I think this is the person (may be Alan Cox too) that can put all worries to the rest.
Did anyone make any statements regarding SCO? I don't remember that I saw anything lately.
My personal guess would be that they have been contacted buy IBM legal department and suggested not to say anything till everything goes to court.
Come to think of it IBM is pretty quiet too. There was something few days ago. But that's nothing compared to what SCO is doing. Could it be that IBM is just quietly preparing to pounce and put SCO out of it's misery once and for all?
Uh should we really waste our time discussing this anymore. I bet by the end of the day there will be 400-600 posts in this thread
Could please elaborate on this more (specifically abolishing Window Managers)? Do you really want to move all that stuff (look, feel, window movements etc.) into GTK/Qt. I am not very familiar with fltk (so may be you could elaborate on this too).
A lot of people mentioned that the above article was very subjective and outright biased. I think there is no surprise there. DE preferences is a very subjective thing (again this was said here before).
But with all that biasness (uhm... can I use this word?) and subjectiveness. I did not like that the author failed to cover some areas that I value above many and I belive a lot of people would appreciate too.
In addition to stability. How about submitting bug report/feature request and actually seeing in a few months seeing things fixed/changed?
[Rating --] KDE - 9.5, GNOME - 9.5, BeOS - 0 (I know I'm not being fair here but it was the author who brought it) WinXP, MacOS X -- uh I don't know how to put it in numbers but it's not very big ones.
Appearence. How about making your own theme/look/feel or leeching on creations of others?
[Rating --] KDE - 8, GNOME - 9.5, BeOS - ??, MacOS X, WinXP -- well your guess is as good as mine.
I know some people might say that a lot of those themes are halfassed. I'd be the first to agree. But there is also a lot of cool stuff out there.
You people feel free to put your own ratings. But we all know... It's all very subjective:).
I tend to agree with you. The rest of us would hardly ever notice the difference.
At the same time I think it is bound to happen. Especially AMD and Apple want this. This is consumer oriented industry. Sometimes however the consumer is dragged into the yet another next millennium by this industry. The reason? Well if the sales are sluggish you need to create some excitement. For better or worse. Basically, sometimes it's just not enugh to do what cnsumer wants but you need sort of create a need.
Question can they pull it? Quite possible. Remember Apple managed to bring RISC processors on the desktop. I think for a while 32 bit vs. 64 bit. will be a lot like RISC vs. CISC.
RISC and CISC sort of grew on eachother in the recent years. God knows, may be soon we will see some mutations on the memory side. (What exactly I have no idea, but I am sure that there is a lot of guys that can come up with something). But yes 32 bit vs. 64 bit might be very similar to RISC vs. CISC not in the engineering sence but in philosophical so to speak. People are going to be writing articles in the magazines (both pro and contra) and of course flame each other on the Internet like they did since the beginning of it.
It seems to be a very emotional issue because it affects almost all of us. I heard one Russian guy saying that America as an industrial nation is finished. And this guy actually brought his company from Russia to America. They are making high power lasers for industrial applications.
I think however it might be not all doom and gloom. On a smaller (i guess, much smaller scale) some relatively big companies went through several outsoruce then bring everything in-house cycles. I had several friends telling me stories like that.
Capitalism is a system with a very strong positive feedback. It's just the way it is. That means a lot of things get overdone or done too much. Like for example in telecom (where I work) I think a lot of companies got closed down a little bit too soon because investors got scared pulled thier money and run awy. Well that's a different story though.
I think with outsourcing it could be the same thing. Let's take a look. First of all world economy was never before globalized to the extent it is now. Second, and this goes to the very big companies, very often large corporations are not loyal to the countries they originated from, they are loyal to themselves. It is natural for them to go for cheapes labor force in the world. Nowdays smaller companies are trying to follow their fit. And of course, i'm almost positive, they are overdoing this. Not everthing can be outsourced effectively. And even if you can there are right and there are wrong ways to do it. And probably at least 50% of it is done in a wrong way.
The problem of course with this picture is that it is possible that when next "bring everything in house" swing comes in you are ready to retire from your Burger King job.
But I have to say that there is one feature that I think specific to the American companies. It is the shortsightedness of their leadership. Performance of a CEO usually measured exclusively based on how the company finished this quarter. And this is one of the reasons why are they paid so much. And boards of directors do not even try to see what is going to happen in 5 or 10 years. There are exceptions of course. But this I think is beyond the scope of this discussion. But I think this shortsightedness is one of ther reason that "outsourcing" is such a buzz word.
Ok, may be their DJ's are not professionals. But they have huge variety of music. Which lets you broaden your horizons so to speak. You can have jam rock followed by rap followed by dance followed by punk etc.
I used to listen commercial radio but I really got sick of it. And I love radio per se. I own couple of scanners couple of shortwave receivers plus the usual FM enabled appliances.
The nice thing about college station that people that play music for you are as excited about it as you are. You might hate their guts sometimes for badmouthing the band you like but that's OK.
Here in Bay Area we are fortunate. There are at least three college stations FM 90.1, 90.5, 103.3 plus some highschool station playing the Big Band stuff. Plus two or three community supported stations. This is what I listen now this and NPR (news).
In one year I discovered more new music I like then in 7 years living in LA and listenning commercial stations.
It all comes down to this. Commercial stations should have money (or they'll stop to exist) be it FM or XM or whatever. That is why they will always stay middle of the road (in any music style you choose). And they will probably make some money and may be XM will be successfull And that is why they are not going to get my money.
Personally I despise people that treat me as "consumer". That is they are going to try to fit me in some kind "dumbass" models based on my race age etc. And I don't want this. I want to deal with people who help me to discover new things.
On the contrary in case of college stations and community supported stations "it's all about sharing" new information new music forgotten old music (but still good). That is why I support them when they have regular fund raising drives.
So let me get this straight. We have this guys who quite often on their own time writ this wonderfull applications. Who do it because they like it. Because tinkering with programs gives them joy. We get this programs basically free. Every time it costs me mere $40 to buy new Slackware CD.
And now we come out to them screaming "WE WANT STANDRDS!".
Which leads me to ask a question: ARE YOU NUTTS?
To my opinion the very stage where we are could be only achieved because the developers were completely free to do whatever they wanted. First and foremost we should let THEM decide what kind of standards they want. All the user can do is to provide inteligent feedback, comments and support.
I think the so called "Linux revolution" is not over. It is just starting adn the best way to kill it is to "organize and lead it".
I completely agree with one of the posters that "United Linux" is just a business venture. No suppose those guys managed to put Red Hat out of business (or significantly shrink their market share). And then few years down the road they'll start their own infiighting. And there will be people slamming the dours flaming each other on the/. Where this will leave users?
On the other hand. Look at this, we have RMS and Linus (two people that have my highest respect) who seem to be on not very good terms with each other. Yet somehow the applications are still being compiled and new versions of kernell keep commming out. A lot of people take this for granted but I used to be a Mac user and I vividly remember when MS was always releasing new versions of Word for Mac later than Windows and every half year or so I had problem when sombody would send me a file from "windows side".
Ultimately giving developers freedom makes users free. And it's not like they live in their own buble. Look few years ago a many developers had "it was hard to code it will be hard to use" mentality. May be it was not expressed openly many times but there was at least subtile attitude of this kind. And now we have a lot of developers that aware of user interface and produce programms that may be not entirely consistent but very very usable.
The last point I want to make maybe not entirely logical. But I think that Linux is comming and will still be comming to enterprise and eventually to many people desktops with people comming out of colleges (the same way like UNIX did). And if (instead of fragmenting linux with many so called "standards" which some people will join and some people will choose not to) we will keep it in the state of "organized chaos" this will provide emploiment opportunity for many people for years to come.
So every time I have to figure out why the configure script does not work when it is supposed to instead of bitching I tell myself "shut up and enjoy the ride"
I have huge respect for Amiga. But I have to tell that I've been hearing about Amiga comming back many times in the past five or so years (including here). And I have yet to see this actually happenning.
That has been tried already. Solid state guitar amps with dsp to try to emulate responce of the old tube amps in fact there are models such amps that give you a responce sellection of different "classical" tube amps. However musicians do not like them and still prefer real tube amps
the main link www.svetlana.com does not show anything at the moment But you can still go to http://www.svetlana.com/docs/tubeworks.html and read about tubes how they work and where and why they are still used.
Russian factory "Svetlana" was bought by american company. They actually have a website (www.svetlana.com). So I guess that wouldn't be a problem.
Overall it is strange idea. Yes distortions make sound better (for guitar amp) but just to amplify transistors would be better because tubes have 1)smaller dynamic range. 2)more noise 3)higher nonlinearity (althouth as it has been pointed out many times above it is better for guitar amps). 4)heat (has been mentioned before).
Besides, your regular vanila PCB is a bad "carier" for tubes. Good high end guitar amps are still built like in old days on a metal frame which also allows you to properly put a filament line (if you have several tubes).
Making a good tube amp was and still is an art as much as scince. So high end (real) stuff is till made by manual labor. So try to massproduce this would be silly (people already tryed that and failed).
But whatever. If the presence of tube will make some guy think that he/she is getting "better" sound let them have it. Perception is a wierd thing.
This is true. Just use close instead exit. And Mr. Moderator, Even though the above post was posted as AC (by whoever submitted that, not me) could you please mod. up the above post so other people could see that. I think that was usefull information.
I know about one guy who used to be a programmer but now is driving a cab but that's about it. Most people I know who were engineers and got fired found new jobs.
Of course it is much tougher now. But from what i hear there are jobs out there. There are startups sitting on substential money there are big companies that still need people to work on their projects. The problem right now that most of those companies are very sellective right now. They are looking for the people with specific skills not just smart people. So it takes longer time to find it. And of course for recent graduate it is very thogh. Mainly because HR and recruitement managers are fucking idiots and greedy bastards.
I talk to people working for Applied Materials and Lamb Research. Off the records they say that we should anticipate that semiconductor industry will go up again in the second half of the year. In telecom there are still startups with money who need people and I still hear about some startups getting new rounds of financing. Hell, I have to say that trafic in Bay Area is pretty bad right now.
I am not particularly familiar with the ArsDigital company but a lot of stuff i've read in the Eve's sounds familiar to me. I just want to tell that we should go with not our emotions (although I think for Eve that would be quite difficult at the moment). We should stop and think.
Look we went through two bubbles. First DotCom bubble bursted then Telecom one (that was the one I went through). A lot of people got greedy, a lot of people lost their money, some people made a lot of money. And a lot of people, mostly engineers (hardware, software take your peak) saw their dreams comming to the crushing end for a moment. Not just dreams of financial stability but dreams of making something that a lot of other people will need. There is a lot of lessons to be learned here.
First of all VC's are not evil and very often are neccessary. NSF and DARPA are not limitless money pits and not every one can have 30 credit cards to run his/her own company. May be in software for a while you can operate from you basement but if you talk about hardware you talk about some significant burt rate almost from the start.
But when you start dealing with VC's you have to remember a few things. They are people with money (well, duh) but for them money make money and this is as far their thinking very often goes. That is when they give you money they expect substential return and FAST. This is veary banal thought I agree but this is where a lot of people stumble. This is what driving most of them. And the most important thing they do not understand the tech (although they think they do). They understand it on such level that it would make geeky kid from high school laugh.
Just an example a few years back I've overheard a conversation in student cafeteria between a bunch MBA students. First they were talking about getting internship at Morgan-Stanly and other "nice" places then they started a "technical" argument. The point was: "who the hell needs optical fiber communications when everything goes wireless?" Well hello!?
But you know what? I bet in a few years somebody may be me may be you will knock on one of those guys door with a buisness plan and really really high expectations.
For them the most important thing is to catch a trend invest some money and get lot's of it in return a few years later. So their understanding of thech goes as far as somthing like "everybody will need high bandwidth right into their living room" and that's it.
There are few exceptions like Intell or IBM when you meet a guy with real engineering experience who actually would come to your place at work and will actually understand what you do down to very small and unglamorous details. You get this guy you are lucky but be warned ppl like that don't take bullshit.
Other than that they know nothing so they hang on to the people they know be it consultants from universities managers CEOs etc. And if they don't know you they don't "feel comfortable" with you for a long time. Hell, I've witnessed one very good manager being demoted just because the board did not know him. So instead we've got people with "names" who drive that guy, me and many other people I work with crazy.
So naturally when everybody was plaing IPO game they wanted growth. And if there was no real growth you were supposed to show it. Like for instance, I don't know about other places but in Bay Area two years ago there was a formula. Each Ph. D. automatically ment extra 3-6 millions of dollars to valuation of the company. Naturally everybody was hiring. When market fell a lot of people got two hours to clean up their desks.
So don't say you got screwed by VC's. You just went along with their game and neither them nor you actually new the rules
So any way learn your lessons. Get rich quick schemes won't work for a while (and may be this is actually good). One thing did not work move on and start a new one. Be good at what you do you will survive one way or another.
Flextronics is a huge contract manufacturing house. That is they will assemble for you anything as long as you pay them and prove them that next year you'll come back with even bigger order.
They are hardware/components people and in the framework described in previous phrase they don't give a rat's behind about linux and microsoft.
Basically man, I could not understand you conspiracy theory. Then again it's 2 am here in Bay Area
regards
But I have to say. All these years when various companies were rolling out different "digital appliances" have proved me one thing. Nothing beats general purpose computer. If you need portability get yourself a good laptop. You will pay 3-5 times more but it will be much more usefull. That is there will be 100 times more ways to kill your time or to organize your time (whatever your preference is).
I predict. One day on Slashdot there will be a post about a guy who found a way to attach a keyboard and a harddrive to this aquapad and I will smile
Re:I have no regrets that Scott tried
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A Loki Timeline
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I totally agree with you. And I hope we will see again commercial game development on Linux.
You can argue ad nauseum what Loki should've done and what should not. But I have a question, I guess, to many people reading/.
With all that scream about Linux superiority, that windows sucks and Bill Gates is evil why not to put your money where you mouth is. Why not stop supporting games on Windows?
And there is a good example for this. Look at the Mac commuinity. People considered the system they were using was better and thought it was Ok to wait a year (iirc) for a Quake port.
I think that double boot is evil. I got rid off it in 1997 and never looked back
I completelly agree with you. And actually Linux has a lot to gain from whatever positive acceptance the OS X will gain. Because whatever GOOD commercial software for OS X will be either ported to the Linux or will be run with the help of open source libraries (wrapers). I am not a specialist to judge but my guess this will be easyer to do than for example WINE (which has come a long way by the way). I am pretty sure I am not the first one to say that.
And on unrelated note. I have to say articles like this has to be taken with a grain of salt. All these journalists/analysts exist on the face of the Earth because somebody somewhere does something. The best thing that could happen to them is that thier words will end up on the mouth of some marketing guy who wants to look smart. And specific article is just a part of Apple's marketing compain to create a warm ant fuzzy feeling for the people who already bought OS X.
So yeah, the promisse to yank Windoze from it's leading positoin would look kind of lame (mainly because it has been done to death already quite unsuccessfully). So of course next thing to do is to say that supposed userbase gain will come from "those Linux users". Who run their OS on "shitty hardware". And in the substential amount have yet to figure out what mouse is for.
What can I say. Those who can do, those who cannot predict
Actualy neither of both. I just know something about telecom. The only point i was trying to make in pevious post is that. It is possible, _in_principle_) to tap optical link and being unnoticed.
One fellow many posts above said that OTDR (optical time domain reflectometry) will detect the tap. What OTDR does is spits optical pulses into the optical link and then detects any pulses that come back. And of course using time of the arrival of the relfected pulse you can calculate where reflection happened. I think this can be remidied by puting optical isolator in front of the tap (whatever this tap is). Optical isolators are very common. Every transmitting laser for long distance has it because these lasers are sensitive to the back reflection.
Now the questioin is what are you going to do with the signal theat you read from the optical link.
The signal in optical cables is not just some kind of stream of bits. The protocol for physical layer is SONET. The minimal unit of this protocol is SONET frame. if you draw on a piece of paper the rectangle 9 squares high and 90 squres long this will be common representation for SONET frame. Each square is one byte. First four coulomns of this matrix (if i remember correctly) will be header which tells what kind of information this packet carries plus some other datails. Then there will be two or three coulomns gap (empty) the rest of the coulomns will be so called payload (actual infromation). So technically speaking you can distinguish SONET frames from each other. For this specific task you don't need supercomputer. Conventional highspeed digital electronics will do fine. But how are you going analyze payload that's different question. And I don't know the answer. I gues to have one or two Crays for a start would be nice.:)
Yes this is tricky part. You can probably do it only during upgrade/repare serivice. Because underwater fiber cable is actually pertty complex thing.
I don't know how modern cables look like but ther first cables that were put in 80's had cooper core and cooper shell with bunch of fibers in between (don't remember how many). Cooper shell and core were used to deliver power to the repeaters which during those times where basically photodiode+LED pair. Which was OK that time because fibers were multimode anyway.
The signal in optical fiber is amplitude modulated. Which means this is a signal easy to tap.
For amplitude modulated signal in general (the least secure of them all) the only way you can notice if you are being taped is if the amplitude of the signal suddenly drops.
This is how, by the way German army dumped a lot of desinformation on Red army through their phone cables in the fields at the beginning of the Warld War II. You see, Sovied Union did not have good quality quartz crystals that time so the Red army tryed to tap german phone lines with the most primitive headphones (you know, based on coil and metal membrane) which consumed noticable amount of power. So as soon as Germans would notice that power in the line droped they'd start some lame conversation with pretty bad consequences for Soviet troops.(mind you, the situation changed by the middle of the WWII).
Now to tap long haul optical line is not big deal because the optical signal is regenerated anyway. You have to do it for many reasons. Amplitude dops due to propagation. About 30 dB per 100 km. You also need to do the correction of the signal that being distorted by dispersion.
If you regenerate signal with repeater then there you go. Because this thing first converts optical signal to electrical then amplifies it and converts back to optical. So in this case you can just tap electrical part.
If signal is being regenerated with EDFA (erbium doped fiber amplyfier) you still can tap it.
It is actually pretty cool idea and was proposed by the guy (as far as i remember) from BT about ten years ago. He and coworkers published about three papers on that subject in various journals including IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics.
What you can do is insert semiconductor optical amplifier in the optical link. It's primary purpose would be to amplify the optical signal. If you really want to hide your presence you need to put it in zero loss regime when amount of the gain in it is equal to the amount of the loss it brings to the system. If you keep this semiconductor optical amplyfier at constant current then voltage drop acros it will be variable if any optical signal comes throug it. So basically you will get electrical signal as a byproduct.
The rest is easy. Everybody knows what SONET frame looks like:) . And pattern is pretty predictable. That is if you know where you put your tap. You will know how the header of the frame should look like.
It is interesting that when it is was proposed this idea was discarded because semiconductor optical amplifiers were not that fast at all. Nowdays they can be used for 10 Gb/s optical links but not for 40 Gb/s which is not big deal yet because 40 Gb/s is not that widely implemented.
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I think this is the person (may be Alan Cox too) that can put all worries to the rest.
Did anyone make any statements regarding SCO? I don't remember that I saw anything lately.
My personal guess would be that they have been contacted buy IBM legal department and suggested not to say anything till everything goes to court.
Come to think of it IBM is pretty quiet too. There was something few days ago. But that's nothing compared to what SCO is doing. Could it be that IBM is just quietly preparing to pounce and put SCO out of it's misery once and for all?
Uh should we really waste our time discussing this anymore. I bet by the end of the day there will be 400-600 posts in this thread
Could please elaborate on this more (specifically abolishing Window Managers)? Do you really want to move all that stuff (look, feel, window movements etc.) into GTK/Qt. I am not very familiar with fltk (so may be you could elaborate on this too).
A lot of people mentioned that the above article was very subjective and outright biased. I think there is no surprise there. DE preferences is a very subjective thing (again this was said here before).
But with all that biasness (uhm... can I use this word?) and subjectiveness. I did not like that the author failed to cover some areas that I value above many and I belive a lot of people would appreciate too.
In addition to stability. How about submitting bug report/feature request and actually seeing in a few months seeing things fixed/changed?
[Rating --] KDE - 9.5, GNOME - 9.5, BeOS - 0 (I know I'm not being fair here but it was the author who brought it) WinXP, MacOS X -- uh I don't know how to put it in numbers but it's not very big ones.
Appearence. How about making your own theme/look/feel or leeching on creations of others?
[Rating --] KDE - 8, GNOME - 9.5, BeOS - ??, MacOS X, WinXP -- well your guess is as good as mine.
I know some people might say that a lot of those themes are halfassed. I'd be the first to agree. But there is also a lot of cool stuff out there.
You people feel free to put your own ratings. But we all know... It's all very subjective :) .
And it does not work on my linux box. Real Player just gives "General Error" with no other info.
I tend to agree with you. The rest of us would hardly ever notice the difference.
At the same time I think it is bound to happen. Especially AMD and Apple want this. This is consumer oriented industry. Sometimes however the consumer is dragged into the yet another next millennium by this industry. The reason? Well if the sales are sluggish you need to create some excitement. For better or worse. Basically, sometimes it's just not enugh to do what cnsumer wants but you need sort of create a need.
Question can they pull it? Quite possible. Remember Apple managed to bring RISC processors on the desktop. I think for a while 32 bit vs. 64 bit. will be a lot like RISC vs. CISC.
RISC and CISC sort of grew on eachother in the recent years. God knows, may be soon we will see some mutations on the memory side. (What exactly I have no idea, but I am sure that there is a lot of guys that can come up with something). But yes 32 bit vs. 64 bit might be very similar to RISC vs. CISC not in the engineering sence but in philosophical so to speak. People are going to be writing articles in the magazines (both pro and contra) and of course flame each other on the Internet like they did since the beginning of it.
At last people are taking this stuff seriously...
Now they just need to catch that guy who shows up here looking like me and screws up my karma.
It seems to be a very emotional issue because it affects almost all of us. I heard one Russian guy saying that America as an industrial nation is finished. And this guy actually brought his company from Russia to America. They are making high power lasers for industrial applications.
I think however it might be not all doom and gloom. On a smaller (i guess, much smaller scale) some relatively big companies went through several outsoruce then bring everything in-house cycles. I had several friends telling me stories like that.
Capitalism is a system with a very strong positive feedback. It's just the way it is. That means a lot of things get overdone or done too much. Like for example in telecom (where I work) I think a lot of companies got closed down a little bit too soon because investors got scared pulled thier money and run awy. Well that's a different story though.
I think with outsourcing it could be the same thing. Let's take a look. First of all world economy was never before globalized to the extent it is now. Second, and this goes to the very big companies, very often large corporations are not loyal to the countries they originated from, they are loyal to themselves. It is natural for them to go for cheapes labor force in the world. Nowdays smaller companies are trying to follow their fit. And of course, i'm almost positive, they are overdoing this. Not everthing can be outsourced effectively. And even if you can there are right and there are wrong ways to do it. And probably at least 50% of it is done in a wrong way.
The problem of course with this picture is that it is possible that when next "bring everything in house" swing comes in you are ready to retire from your Burger King job.
But I have to say that there is one feature that I think specific to the American companies. It is the shortsightedness of their leadership. Performance of a CEO usually measured exclusively based on how the company finished this quarter. And this is one of the reasons why are they paid so much. And boards of directors do not even try to see what is going to happen in 5 or 10 years. There are exceptions of course. But this I think is beyond the scope of this discussion. But I think this shortsightedness is one of ther reason that "outsourcing" is such a buzz word.
Ok, may be their DJ's are not professionals. But they have huge variety of music. Which lets you broaden your horizons so to speak. You can have jam rock followed by rap followed by dance followed by punk etc.
I used to listen commercial radio but I really got sick of it. And I love radio per se. I own couple of scanners couple of shortwave receivers plus the usual FM enabled appliances.
The nice thing about college station that people that play music for you are as excited about it as you are. You might hate their guts sometimes for badmouthing the band you like but that's OK.
Here in Bay Area we are fortunate. There are at least three college stations FM 90.1, 90.5, 103.3 plus some highschool station playing the Big Band stuff. Plus two or three community supported stations. This is what I listen now this and NPR (news).
In one year I discovered more new music I like then in 7 years living in LA and listenning commercial stations.
It all comes down to this. Commercial stations should have money (or they'll stop to exist) be it FM or XM or whatever. That is why they will always stay middle of the road (in any music style you choose). And they will probably make some money and may be XM will be successfull And that is why they are not going to get my money.
Personally I despise people that treat me as "consumer". That is they are going to try to fit me in some kind "dumbass" models based on my race age etc. And I don't want this. I want to deal with people who help me to discover new things.
On the contrary in case of college stations and community supported stations "it's all about sharing" new information new music forgotten old music (but still good). That is why I support them when they have regular fund raising drives.
So let me get this straight. We have this guys who quite often on their own time writ this wonderfull applications. Who do it because they like it. Because tinkering with programs gives them joy. We get this programs basically free. Every time it costs me mere $40 to buy new Slackware CD.
/. Where this will leave users?
And now we come out to them screaming "WE WANT STANDRDS!".
Which leads me to ask a question: ARE YOU NUTTS?
To my opinion the very stage where we are could be only achieved because the developers were completely free to do whatever they wanted. First and foremost we should let THEM decide what kind of standards they want. All the user can do is to provide inteligent feedback, comments and support.
I think the so called "Linux revolution" is not over. It is just starting adn the best way to kill it is to "organize and lead it".
I completely agree with one of the posters that "United Linux" is just a business venture. No suppose those guys managed to put Red Hat out of business (or significantly shrink their market share). And then few years down the road they'll start their own infiighting. And there will be people slamming the dours flaming each other on the
On the other hand. Look at this, we have RMS and Linus (two people that have my highest respect) who seem to be on not very good terms with each other. Yet somehow the applications are still being compiled and new versions of kernell keep commming out. A lot of people take this for granted but I used to be a Mac user and I vividly remember when MS was always releasing new versions of Word for Mac later than Windows and every half year or so I had problem when sombody would send me a file from "windows side".
Ultimately giving developers freedom makes users free. And it's not like they live in their own buble. Look few years ago a many developers had "it was hard to code it will be hard to use" mentality. May be it was not expressed openly many times but there was at least subtile attitude of this kind. And now we have a lot of developers that aware of user interface and produce programms that may be not entirely consistent but very very usable.
The last point I want to make maybe not entirely logical. But I think that Linux is comming and will still be comming to enterprise and eventually to many people desktops with people comming out of colleges (the same way like UNIX did). And if (instead of fragmenting linux with many so called "standards" which some people will join and some people will choose not to) we will keep it in the state of "organized chaos" this will provide emploiment opportunity for many people for years to come.
So every time I have to figure out why the configure script does not work when it is supposed to instead of bitching I tell myself "shut up and enjoy the ride"
Actually my friend had a theory that Tetris had a lot in common with "aggressive" driving and I have to say that he was pretty good at both.
Eventually he totaled his car.
I have huge respect for Amiga. But I have to tell that I've been hearing about Amiga comming back many times in the past five or so years (including here). And I have yet to see this actually happenning.
That has been tried already. Solid state guitar amps with dsp to try to emulate responce of the old tube amps in fact there are models such amps that give you a responce sellection of different "classical" tube amps. However musicians do not like them and still prefer real tube amps
the main link www.svetlana.com does not show anything at the moment But you can still go to http://www.svetlana.com/docs/tubeworks.html and read about tubes how they work and where and why they are still used.
Russian factory "Svetlana" was bought by american company. They actually have a website (www.svetlana.com). So I guess that wouldn't be a problem.
Overall it is strange idea.
Yes distortions make sound better (for guitar amp) but just to amplify transistors would be better because tubes have
1)smaller dynamic range.
2)more noise
3)higher nonlinearity (althouth as it has been pointed out many times above it is better for guitar amps).
4)heat (has been mentioned before).
Besides, your regular vanila PCB is a bad "carier" for tubes. Good high end guitar amps are still built like in old days on a metal frame which also allows you to properly put a filament line (if you have several tubes).
Making a good tube amp was and still is an art as much as scince. So high end (real) stuff is till made by manual labor. So try to massproduce this would be silly (people already tryed that and failed).
But whatever. If the presence of tube will make some guy think that he/she is getting "better" sound let them have it. Perception is a wierd thing.
This is true. Just use close instead exit.
And Mr. Moderator,
Even though the above post was posted as AC (by whoever submitted that, not me) could you please mod. up the above post so other people could see that.
I think that was usefull information.
Just my $0.02
Exactly!
They are not tecies.
I know about one guy who used to be a programmer but now is driving a cab but that's about it. Most people I know who were engineers and got fired found new jobs.
Of course it is much tougher now. But from what i hear there are jobs out there. There are startups sitting on substential money there are big companies that still need people to work on their projects. The problem right now that most of those companies are very sellective right now. They are looking for the people with specific skills not just smart people. So it takes longer time to find it. And of course for recent graduate it is very thogh. Mainly because HR and recruitement managers are fucking idiots and greedy bastards.
I talk to people working for Applied Materials and Lamb Research. Off the records they say that we should anticipate that semiconductor industry will go up again in the second half of the year. In telecom there are still startups with money who need people and I still hear about some startups getting new rounds of financing. Hell, I have to say that trafic in Bay Area is pretty bad right now.
I am not particularly familiar with the ArsDigital company but a lot of stuff i've read in the Eve's sounds familiar to me. I just want to tell that we should go with not our emotions (although I think for Eve that would be quite difficult at the moment). We should stop and think.
Look we went through two bubbles. First DotCom bubble bursted then Telecom one (that was the one I went through). A lot of people got greedy, a lot of people lost their money, some people made a lot of money. And a lot of people, mostly engineers (hardware, software take your peak) saw their dreams comming to the crushing end for a moment. Not just dreams of financial stability but dreams of making something that a lot of other people will need. There is a lot of lessons to be learned here.
First of all VC's are not evil and very often are neccessary. NSF and DARPA are not limitless money pits and not every one can have 30 credit cards to run his/her own company. May be in software for a while you can operate from you basement but if you talk about hardware you talk about some significant burt rate almost from the start.
But when you start dealing with VC's you have to remember a few things. They are people with money (well, duh) but for them money make money and this is as far their thinking very often goes. That is when they give you money they expect substential return and FAST. This is veary banal thought I agree but this is where a lot of people stumble. This is what driving most of them. And the most important thing they do not understand the tech (although they think they do). They understand it on such level that it would make geeky kid from high school laugh.
Just an example a few years back I've overheard a conversation in student cafeteria between a bunch MBA students. First they were talking about getting internship at Morgan-Stanly and other "nice" places then they started a "technical" argument. The point was: "who the hell needs optical fiber communications when everything goes wireless?" Well hello!?
But you know what? I bet in a few years somebody may be me may be you will knock on one of those guys door with a buisness plan and really really high expectations.
For them the most important thing is to catch a trend invest some money and get lot's of it in return a few years later. So their understanding of thech goes as far as somthing like "everybody will need high bandwidth right into their living room" and that's it.
There are few exceptions like Intell or IBM when you meet a guy with real engineering experience who actually would come to your place at work and will actually understand what you do down to very small and unglamorous details. You get this guy you are lucky but be warned ppl like that don't take bullshit.
Other than that they know nothing so they hang on to the people they know be it consultants from universities managers CEOs etc. And if they don't know you they don't "feel comfortable" with you for a long time. Hell, I've witnessed one very good manager being demoted just because the board did not know him. So instead we've got people with "names" who drive that guy, me and many other people I work with crazy.
So naturally when everybody was plaing IPO game they wanted growth. And if there was no real growth you were supposed to show it. Like for instance, I don't know about other places but in Bay Area two years ago there was a formula. Each Ph. D. automatically ment extra 3-6 millions of dollars to valuation of the company. Naturally everybody was hiring. When market fell a lot of people got two hours to clean up their desks.
So don't say you got screwed by VC's. You just went along with their game and neither them nor you actually new the rules
So any way learn your lessons. Get rich quick schemes won't work for a while (and may be this is actually good). One thing did not work move on and start a new one. Be good at what you do you will survive one way or another.
I will be serving to you tonight. The mandatory 15% tip will be automatically deducted from off-shore bank account.
Flextronics is a huge contract manufacturing house. That is they will assemble for you anything as long as you pay them and prove them that next year you'll come back with even bigger order.
They are hardware/components people and in the framework described in previous phrase they don't give a rat's behind about linux and microsoft.
Basically man, I could not understand you conspiracy theory. Then again it's 2 am here in Bay Area
regards
Yeah it's kind of nice toy.
But I have to say. All these years when various companies were rolling out different "digital appliances" have proved me one thing. Nothing beats general purpose computer. If you need portability get yourself a good laptop. You will pay 3-5 times more but it will be much more usefull. That is there will be 100 times more ways to kill your time or to organize your time (whatever your preference is).
I predict. One day on Slashdot there will be a post about a guy who found a way to attach a keyboard and a harddrive to this aquapad and I will smile
I totally agree with you. And I hope we will see again commercial game development on Linux. /.
You can argue ad nauseum what Loki should've done and what should not. But I have a question, I guess, to many people reading
With all that scream about Linux superiority, that windows sucks and Bill Gates is evil why not to put your money where you mouth is. Why not stop supporting games on Windows?
And there is a good example for this. Look at the Mac commuinity. People considered the system they were using was better and thought it was Ok to wait a year (iirc) for a Quake port.
I think that double boot is evil. I got rid off it in 1997 and never looked back
I completelly agree with you. And actually Linux has a lot to gain from whatever positive acceptance the OS X will gain. Because whatever GOOD commercial software for OS X will be either ported to the Linux or will be run with the help of open source libraries (wrapers). I am not a specialist to judge but my guess this will be easyer to do than for example WINE (which has come a long way by the way). I am pretty sure I am not the first one to say that.
And on unrelated note. I have to say articles like this has to be taken with a grain of salt. All these journalists/analysts exist on the face of the Earth because somebody somewhere does something. The best thing that could happen to them is that thier words will end up on the mouth of some marketing guy who wants to look smart. And specific article is just a part of Apple's marketing compain to create a warm ant fuzzy feeling for the people who already bought OS X.
So yeah, the promisse to yank Windoze from it's leading positoin would look kind of lame (mainly because it has been done to death already quite unsuccessfully). So of course next thing to do is to say that supposed userbase gain will come from "those Linux users". Who run their OS on "shitty hardware". And in the substential amount have yet to figure out what mouse is for.
What can I say. Those who can do, those who cannot predict
Actualy neither of both. I just know something about telecom. The only point i was trying to make in pevious post is that. It is possible, _in_principle_) to tap optical link and being unnoticed. :)
One fellow many posts above said that OTDR (optical time domain reflectometry) will detect the tap. What OTDR does is spits optical pulses into the optical link and then detects any pulses that come back. And of course using time of the arrival of the relfected pulse you can calculate where reflection happened. I think this can be remidied by puting optical isolator in front of the tap (whatever this tap is). Optical isolators are very common. Every transmitting laser for long distance has it because these lasers are sensitive to the back reflection.
Now the questioin is what are you going to do with the signal theat you read from the optical link.
The signal in optical cables is not just some kind of stream of bits. The protocol for physical layer is SONET. The minimal unit of this protocol is SONET frame. if you draw on a piece of paper the rectangle 9 squares high and 90 squres long this will be common representation for SONET frame. Each square is one byte. First four coulomns of this matrix (if i remember correctly) will be header which tells what kind of information this packet carries plus some other datails. Then there will be two or three coulomns gap (empty) the rest of the coulomns will be so called payload (actual infromation). So technically speaking you can distinguish SONET frames from each other. For this specific task you don't need supercomputer. Conventional highspeed digital electronics will do fine. But how are you going analyze payload that's different question. And I don't know the answer. I gues to have one or two Crays for a start would be nice.
Yes this is tricky part. You can probably do it only during upgrade/repare serivice. Because underwater fiber cable is actually pertty complex thing.
I don't know how modern cables look like but ther first cables that were put in 80's had cooper core and cooper shell with bunch of fibers in between (don't remember how many). Cooper shell and core were used to deliver power to the repeaters which during those times where basically photodiode+LED pair. Which was OK that time because fibers were multimode anyway.
The signal in optical fiber is amplitude modulated. Which means this is a signal easy to tap. :) . And pattern is pretty predictable. That is if you know where you put your tap. You will know how the header of the frame should look like.
For amplitude modulated signal in general (the least secure of them all) the only way you can notice if you are being taped is if the amplitude of the signal suddenly drops.
This is how, by the way German army dumped a lot of desinformation on Red army through their phone cables in the fields at the beginning of the Warld War II. You see, Sovied Union did not have good quality quartz crystals that time so the Red army tryed to tap german phone lines with the most primitive headphones (you know, based on coil and metal membrane) which consumed noticable amount of power. So as soon as Germans would notice that power in the line droped they'd start some lame conversation with pretty bad consequences for Soviet troops.(mind you, the situation changed by the middle of the WWII).
Now to tap long haul optical line is not big deal because the optical signal is regenerated anyway. You have to do it for many reasons. Amplitude dops due to propagation. About 30 dB per 100 km. You also need to do the correction of the signal that being distorted by dispersion.
If you regenerate signal with repeater then there you go. Because this thing first converts optical signal to electrical then amplifies it and converts back to optical. So in this case you can just tap electrical part.
If signal is being regenerated with EDFA (erbium doped fiber amplyfier) you still can tap it.
It is actually pretty cool idea and was proposed by the guy (as far as i remember) from BT about ten years ago. He and coworkers published about three papers on that subject in various journals including IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics.
What you can do is insert semiconductor optical amplifier in the optical link. It's primary purpose would be to amplify the optical signal. If you really want to hide your presence you need to put it in zero loss regime when amount of the gain in it is equal to the amount of the loss it brings to the system. If you keep this semiconductor optical amplyfier at constant current then voltage drop acros it will be variable if any optical signal comes throug it. So basically you will get electrical signal as a byproduct.
The rest is easy. Everybody knows what SONET frame looks like
It is interesting that when it is was proposed this idea was discarded because semiconductor optical amplifiers were not that fast at all. Nowdays they can be used for 10 Gb/s optical links but not for 40 Gb/s which is not big deal yet because 40 Gb/s is not that widely implemented.