Obviously if you're a developer you have to be supporting the development environment your company uses, and if that's Windows, it's Windows, and Cygwin/X/GNOME on top of that is a major architectural decision - so run Unix on separate boxes, or at least use those removable disk drive drawers.
But many of us aren't PC developers - we're network hackers, or consultants, or router developers, and that PC on our desk is a communication tool maintained by some IT department that wants to make sure we can word-process, print, email, surf, dial up from the road, and fill out forms in a compatible fashion, so to them we're just Users. In that environment, most of them don't care what extra tools you use as long as you don't ask them for support and don't mess up the tools they do support in confusing ways. So sure, if you've got the disk space, install Cygwin and X and GNOME and EMACS, and just make sure that when you send the HR folks the Excel spreadsheet that says what projects you worked on this month and which customers to charge for it, you're using their favorite macros and column headings. And use that other removable disk drive tray to run Linux with WINE on top:-)
The hard part is to find creative ways to get the public, and maybe the politicans, to understand what evil things the politicians are doing. I don't understand the local attitudes in your areas well enough to say what are the best ways to present your case. Some ideas I can think of:
You are trying to research the evils that the Nazis did during the War, and you are trying to research the evils that remaining Nazis are doing today, and these internet censors are making it hard to locate the evildoers. Or you help organizations that watch Nazis to find them on the web, but the censorship makes it difficult.
The censorship tools are forcing the current Nazis to use higher technology - bad enough that those partially-literate thugs are using the Internet, but now the censors are giving them a reason to learn more technology which they will use to organize their evil groups in secrecy, instead of more public locations where they can be found.
Perhaps you have Internet services that you want to prevent Nazis from using, but it is difficult to identify the Nazis because of the censorship.
Perhaps the censorship is hiding other things, not just Nazis - Former Stasi? Corruption? Lazy Police? The only way to know is to permit transparency.
Some of these approaches require you to be actively working on Nazi-hunting to be credible; some of them only require you to care about censorship or about making it easy for other people to fight Nazis. You will have to find your own path here.
Occasionally you'll find a web page that's got several hundred KB of actual text, but it's usually not that way - most of the bits are decorative GIFs or JPGs which your modem won't compress. So you've got to pay attention to it upfront - use image formats that are already compressed (compare GIFs, JPGs, newer formats like DjVu, different resolutions), and pay attention to how much you want to clutter up the pages with them. Are they fundamental content? Nice but could be lighter weight? Unnecessary clutter when you could use a nice solid-color background instead? How often do you reuse them? Can you cache them effectively, either in the user's browser or ISP, or does the browser think each one of those customized bullets is a different dynamically generated file that it needs to download?
Really, the Bush Administration has no plans to just pick up and move other countries by tweaking their GPS coordinates on occasion. Hey, French Elections this week - let's shove them a couple feet to the right - that'll show'em Austrian right-wingers causing bad press? No problem, now the same guys are a bit farther left. Belgian EU Bureaucrats acting up? Relocate them to the English Channel, or reset their clocks back a few years before they were elected, and they'll go back home. Piece of cake.
If you're having problems at 11Mbps, and they're not just bad radio giving you heavy packet losses, something's wrong with your Outlook configuration or the networks supporting it.
My building has 100Mbps LAN, though my laptop currently has a 10Mbps card since the 100Mbps dongle broke (:-), but the connection to the outside world is only a T1 (1.5Mbps, symmetric), and it's more than enough bandwidth to get huge Powerpoint presentations from those marketing folks at headquarters.
Sure, if you're trying to connect a couple of machines in the same room at home, $200 and even $100 card are a toy, though connecting machines on different floors of a house may or may not be easy.
But offices are much different - wiring cubicles for Cat5 and running it back to a phone closet costs money, and hubs that can provide management services (for lots of users) as opposed to simple dumb hubs also costs money, and reconnecting the things every time you play the Shrinking Cubicle Space Game costs money. Especially now that wireless cards are $100 heading for ~$50, and good laptop 100baseT cards are $40, if you're not loading your network heavily, wireless is a big win.
It's not as strong a case if you're in a file-server-intensive environment, but for typical corporate use, 10 Mbps is enough for a lot of users doing email, printing, and web browsing plus their desktop-based apps. (Of course you'd run 100Mbps for a wired network, now that it's as cheap as 10Mbps.)
Wireless is also a really convenient approach for office telephones, as long as they don't interfere with wireless data connections, cell phones, microwave ovens,.... Eliminating Moves/Adds/Changes for phones is a big win.
Cell phones, cordless phones, wireless networking, etc. should all use strong encryption, yet none of them do?
Sometimes you have to attribute it to malice, sometimes to stupidity, sometimes to changes in technology.
Analog cellphones were too early, and you need to digitize data to do effective encryption. Analog cordless phones have the same problem, plus they're trying to be cheap.
Digital cellphones are primarily weak because of malice - the US government armtwisted the US TDMA and CDMA standards committees into using obnoxiously weak encryption, with the leverage that crypto export laws could be used to prevent them from selling profit-making cell site equipment internationally and getting cheap handsets made internationally.
The European GSM primary encryption algorithm A5/1 is technically incompetent, and doesn't have enough bits in the encryption keys, but as Goldberg et al. discovered, it's further weakened by setting 10 of its bits to all-zeros. And the alternate encryption algorithms designed for non-politically-connected countries are even weaker. The algorithm incompetence could have been prevented by developing it in public, with some competent peer review, but the demands for secrecy blocked it - as anybody in the crypto business knows, that's a big lose.
Anything using 40 or 64 bit crypto is limited by US export laws (either current at the time the stuff was designed, or obsolete but old habit.)
56-bit DES encryption used to be adequate technology, but reality caught up with them. Unfortunately, it does enough slow bit-twiddling that the triple-DES variation, which is strong enough for anything, is too slow for many high-speed applications unless you add appropriate hardware implementations or a fast CPU. Also, there are applications that only use 56-bit single-DES for US export law reasons (again, generally no longer applicable, but some countries also restrict imports.)
Any current 128-bit symmetric algorithm is strong enough (though some of them use MD5 hashes to generate keys, and those are looking technically shaky - but you can avoid that.) IDEA had minor patent problems (but Ascom-tech was friendly about free licenses for non-commercial use, and reasonably priced for commercial use.)
RC4 encryption has a few simple rules about using it safely, like "never use the same key twice" and "if you're using it to XOR with your plaintext, make sure to design your application so it doesn't give away information." That's what killed Microsoft PPTP, and it's one of the problems with WEP. No malice, just incompetence.
Authentication is hard. Sure, the RSA algorithm provides some of the fundamental tools, and now that the patent's expired it's easier to use them, but if you want to limit access to authenticated authorized users, you have to solve the problem of deciding who's authorized to do what, how to authenticate that they are, and how to distribute the data to enforce it. This is where many systems choke. Do you need PKIs? Do you want to distribute shared secrets? Do you want to allow promiscuous connections from anybody driving by with am 802.11b in their laptop and still have something you call security?
The market is usually more concerned about authentication than privacy. Not too many people eavesdrop on cellphone calls for the content, compared to the likelihood that if a bad authentication method makes it easy for Bad Guys to clone your cellphone and make $500 calls to Bolivia which you'll refuse to pay The Phone Company for, so that's where the emphasis is. Privacy is important to some users (and there are things many people won't talk about over cellphones), but if it doesn't leak password information it's often just not a priority.
Add your own issues here. There are lots of them...
802.11b wasn't much of a problem for Linux - the cards look about like an Ethernet card, with some extra frobs you can tweak if you want to (e.g. the so-called security features, and features that tell you how the RF sections are doing.) I'm told that 802.11a is much different - it expects much more driver support from the operating system, somewhat the same way that Winmodems do. Some of the chip and card makers are working on Linux driver support, but before using 802.11a you'll need to find out how much you really get from them, and when - they've got an obvious market priority to get Windows working first.
Comdex isn't Interop, and it's been a long time since Interop was Interop either. The only good reason to haul a laptop around the show floor is to do 802.11 scanning. This is a huge show, and you're there to see the sights and pick up either information or trinkets from vendors, exchange business cards, and maybe get job interviews. Your PDA may be helpful, but your laptop is just dead weight.
Just in case there are any vendors who haven't figured out the hot giveaway items that will get people to stop by your booth this Comdex, it's obviously plastic bags for carrying around literature , t-shirts, CDs, and other trinkets from other vendors. It's really a sinister plot by the plastic bag makers.
You can spare a memory slot for the FPGA board, if your mobo has three slots.
Memory has become ridiculously large and cheap. 512MB boards are under $50. I'm sure there are people who need more than 1GB on a non-production machine (obviously production machines like database servers need all they can fit), but for most applications, by the time you need to fill the third memory slot on your box, you could just as well buy a new card that's 4X larger than the old one you're rolling out.
If you've only got two slots, you may have problems, but usually the main time you need the third slot is if you're upgrading a machine and want to keep the old memory as well. And sometimes you've got a board that doesn't have enough address lines or has a BIOS that doesn't understand them (my home machine *says* it can use 3x256MB memory, but it looks like I'll have to flash a new BIOS to do it, and so far 192MB has been plenty.)
If you don't have something else special to do, like FPGA, you might as well keep the old RAM - doesn't hurt, and more memory is always usable as long as it doesn't force you to a lower speed. I recently added 512MB to a 128MB maachine at work, giving 640MB. Bill Gates says that ought to be enough for anybody:-)
Depends on what you're trying to do with the FPGA. Are you modeling a new chip, and you want the ability to poke around anywhere in the insides? Or are you modeling an I/O device ASIC that needs to have lots of inputs and outputs? For the latter, probably a memory interface is bad. For the former, maybe it's better. Are you planning to use if for a processor adjunct, like an MPEG encoder? Maybe a memory bus connection is just about right. How much do you need to interface with the outside world? Is your primary application "A Grad-Student Project That Enables Other Grad-Student Projects"? In that case, a memory-bus interface would be cool, and if nobody's done it for the last 3-5 generation s of processor/bus architecture, that makes it even cooler:-)
If you're trying to explore new coprocessor architectures, it's an interesting thing to try - certainly better than hanging coprocessors out on a PCI bus somewhere. Of course, these days, CPUs are fast enough that it's difficult to find applications that really need enough more horsepower than general-purpose processors can provide, but there are still enough edgy things to try that it could be worthwhile.
I first saw an early version of Acme when Rob Pike was giving a Plan 9 talk at Usenix (maybe Nashville? Maybe ~1990?)(Since Plan 9 uses Unicode, that's really 8 1/2 with a genuine 1/2 character...) I wasn't impressed so much with Acme, but Pike was mainly talking about it in the context that he'd tried to develop something that was much different from his previous Blit terminal window system, which was a pleasantly fast overlapping-windows system on a 68000 box. What really impressed me was the speed of the window system startup - he typed 81/2, hit return, and the window system was up and running in about the time it would take for a $ prompt to show up. His description of the environment was "Ken and I have spent 10 years studying things that window systems shouldn't do and we wrote one that doesn't do them." A bit ugly, but blazingly fast and lightweight. The window system was written in about 64KB of code; he compiled it during the talk (took a few seconds on the 680x0 Next hardware, and he commented that it was much faster on the Murray Hill Plan 9 CPU server cluster.)
Individual businesses borrowing money from foreign banks for business projects that may succeed or fail, just as businesses in the first or third world borrow money from home-country banks. This is perfectly acceptable, with normal business risks for both sides, and lenders expecting to be paid back if the business doesn't fail is legitimate. Sometimes this is especially good social practice - charity-run microloan projects helping very small businesses get off the ground, expecting a higher risk than normal.
The problem case - lending to governments in third world countries, either by individual banks or (more commonly) by government-backed banks, whether it's the IMF or US Ex-IM bank or other government-backed bankloans designed to encourage exports or gain political influence. This fits in the category of foreign aid as "taking money from poor people in rich countries and giving it to rich people in poor countries". The most common abuses of this are loans for military hardware, which the recipients are expected to buy from politically-connected arms dealers in the lending countries, and big construction projects which are usually environmentally irresponsible and giveaways to politically well-connected groups in the country. Sometimes the government that borrowed the money is still in power, sometimes it's not, sometimes the money was spent on something useful that improved the country's economy so there's more money around that they could tax to pay back the loans, other times the money was wasted and is gone, or was spent on weapons that are best left rusting rather than used, or given to rich friends of politicians and sitting in some Swiss bank account somewhere. Should the current government pay back the loans that it or its predecessors borrowed? Should it pay interest on them? Occasionally the answer is yes, occasionally it's no, but the real problem is that the current government wants to borrow more money, and it won't get any unless it can convince lenders there's some chance of getting it back. Obviously the US isn't going to declare war on some small country just to go collect debts for its banks, and just as obviously they'll occasionally want to "lend" money to small countries to buy more weapons from US military-industrial-complex dealers even if there's no hope of getting it back, and both of those actions would be wrong.
The middle case - individual businesses borrowing money from first-world-government-subsidized banks, whether it's the IMF or government-guaranteed loans from commercial banks. Sometimes this is legitmate social policy, as with the development micro-loans, and sometimes it's bogus lending on bogus projects, where the borrower is either scamming the lender, or is at least overoptimistic like Silicon-Valley-boom startups thinking they can make money with on-line tulip-bulb sales. The banks are often guilty here, in that they're making loans that due diligence would have rejected, but because they're taxpayer-backed they've got less concern with due diligence.
So when you're talking about "forgiving third world debt", are you talking about the rich countries declaring that money they've indirectly given to their own arms dealers or poured down other ratholes to be bad debt? Or are you talking about governments in rich countries using tax money to pay off bankers for risky business investments? Or are you talking about bankers in rich countries who made loans for legitimate business activities that looked like there was some chance of being paid back becoming forbidden (by either their own or the third-world country's government) to collect from the borrowers if the business projects were successful? The latter kind of debt forgiveness would be the kiss of death for any third-world business (small or large) trying to get access to capital to expand their business, which would be a really bad thing for the world economy. The others are variations on governments conspiring to rip off taxpayers in both countries; your choice on that.
But if the third-world government wants to borrow more money, which they will, is that something you want to encourage?
OK, we've known for a while that Safesurf, like many of their competitors, is confused about what freedom of speech is about and what the Constitutional protections for it are about, and they've got random difficulties with English grammar and basic logic as well. The Safesurf MAPS rant complains about them stealth-blocking websites that may contain important information, and people won't know they're being censored. But they've got the technology wrong: MAPS doesn't block websites - they provide tools that are normally used for blocking emails and furthermore, sites that implement MAPS tools properly normally provide bouncegrams telling people they block how and why their email was rejected, so they can fix their problems. The only way a company like Safesurf would be "censored" by a MAPS-using mailbox service would be if they sent out email to people - and since they'd find out they had a problem the first time they tried to send mail, they could put a notice on their website about it and tell people who want followup communications from them how to contact them.
Furthermore, Safesurf's web site violates Safesurf's proposed law creating (and mixing up) civil and criminal penalties and tort liability for mislabeling or failing to label web sites. Their original proposal was more aggressive than their current one, but it still doesn't require any actual harm to any actual child, as long as there are graphic images on the site (logos and decorations may not be harmful, but they're graphics, so we're covered there.) Plaintiffs can sue if the site doesn't provide appropriate ratings labels on material severe enough to be potentially harmful to children. Certainly, any proposal to throw people in jail for what they write on the net is pretty severe, and could cause harm to children who write things without labeling them if such a law were passed, and telling kids that people want to do that kind of harm to them just for what they write, even if there's no law passed, can also be pretty scary. www.safesurf.com's label says
"CONTENT='(PICS-1.1 "http://www.classify.org/safesurf/" l r (SS~~000 1))'"
which if you look it up on the explanatory web site doesn't have any indication of what the rating means. It does point to a site that tells you how to download a ".rat" file into your browser, and if you open up that file with a text editor instead of installing it, the file indicates something about "all ages", but doesn't indicate whether it's appropriate or inappropriate for all ages, so that a web browser could be set to do the appropriate thing with it, though it clearly implies that the really scary material complained about above should be appropriate for all ages....
*Obviously* you do the compression out near the cameras; anything else would be silly, with the possible exception of doing lightweight compression at the cameras and heavier-duty compression at a centralized server, if you're in a LAN / Metro area network where bandwidth is cheaper than distributing lots of hardware. But you still need to figure out what level of data transmission is realistic - "90KB/sec" is 720 kbps, which is half a T1 line. (As a telecom vendor, I'd be happy to sell you 1000 T1s or equivalent Internet or FrameRelay/ATM bandwidth:-), at least assuming you're in the US where I've got bandwidth to sell instead of subcontracting. But your problems are much different if you're trying to camerafy every FooBar Retail Store in North America vs. trying to camerafy every street corner in Toronto.) But do you really need this much? Most business video-conferencing is 384kbps or 128kbps,and even 64kbps can be surprisingly good, especially since you don't mind grayscale. This lets you use DSL or ISDN to connect your remote sites (or if your cameras are in groups, lets you put more cameras per T1 from each group going back to your central locations.) This also means that your central location (or locations, depending on your disaster recovery needs and your bandwidth-vs-operations needs) can get by with a much more realistic data connection - if there's any long-distance component to the communications, you'll be much happier buying an OC3 than an OC48 or GigE, though in a metro area, if there's dark fiber, it doesn't much matter what speed you run at.
Your big driver here is the compressed data rates - it's a large enough project that being off by 2:1, or even by 10%, can be worth serious money. Have you validated that the estimates you're using are correct? Obviously the 640x480 x Colordepth x Frames/Sec x NumberOfCameras are correct, but the compression ratios are a big variable, and it's potentially worth spending more money on compression to improve the ratios. Have you run tests for typical locations to see what the real data rates are, and evaluated whether you can improve them?
Any video compression algorithms worth using for this kind of application do comparisons from one frame to the next, and only compress the differences (except for occasional reference frames.) Some of them do substantial motion compensation to model the differences, others don't. Many of them let you tweak the frequency of reference frames - is it every 10? Every 100? Do you need the ability to go backwards, or is smooth forward and clunky backwards good enough?
Very few locations actually generate much motion on a 24-hour basis, except for road traffic cameras, and I'd be extremely surprised to see an application need to store those on a long-term basis (as opposed to storing for a week or so in case there are traffic accidents - anything you need longer than that should probably be handled by license-plate recognizers.)
OK, it's clearly not what was intended:-) But use the same bicycle pump pressure mechanism to push the jet fuel / gasoline / whatever out to the nozzle and let it burn there.
OK, so you can't use Microsoft proprietary tools, and you're limited to things that work in Open Source environments or at least self-contained environments instead of tying in to MS's way of doing things.
Actually, there may be some components that are worth using, but ActiveX is a security nightmare, and my experience with applications saving their information in the Registry instead of.ini files is that it becomes unmaintainable for the users, because MS designed the Registry to only be accessible by programmers and people willing to risk using Regedit, so you can't easily copy the configurations from one machine to another or back them up.
Please don't rate this "Flamebait" - I already dropped the +1 Karma Bonus myself to reflect that:-)
My company has a large number of sales people and network operations people (where "network operations" means installing stuff for customers) and a large IT staff who are tuned for supporting them. I get "supported" by the same people (sigh.) But for a large sales force, this really makes sensetheir computers are laptops which they carry around in the field (so Bad Things happen to them fairly often and some fraction need replacing as a result.)
their primary jobs are email, writing text/presentations/spreadsheets, doing forms on the web, getting information off the web, and other communications jobs.
The Registry is a terribly annoying system built to obfuscate application and configuration information and make it hard to move between machines. And tools that hide drivers in among the operating system guts have similar problems. If you wanted a clean environment, you wouldn't be using Windows.
There are lots of sales people, and individualized attention doesn't scale well.
Personnel turnover is relatively high, as great sales people get stolen by the competition or customers, the competition's great sales people get stolen by us, bad or unlucky sales people don't make quota and get booted, and in general they want to minimize training costs for computer platform tools, focusing the training on directly-business-related tools.
The standard computing environment is Microsoft, which means that Bad Things happen to it fairly often, and the most effective repair methods are destructive - save the user's files and wipe the computing environment.
A surprising number of tools can be developed as Excel and Word macros or other things that don't look like installing new programs.
All of this looks entirely unlike developers.
The really tough part for most sales people is supporting individual productivity tools that haven't yet received corporate support - everybody figured out Palm Pilot support really fast, Visio was a bit slower, and Dragon Dictate and some of the contact managers aren't widely used.
Does this suck for me? Yes, because I'm not just a user - I install all kinds of cool stuff off the net, partly because of the productivity win of having my personal email and environment on the machine I carry on the road with me instead of one system at home and one laptop for work, and I can read my personal email on the train.
Does anybody know Senator Ted Stevens's position on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and oil drilling in general? He's Hollings's co-sponsor on this atrocity of a bill, and the Senator from Alaska. In addition to trashing large chunks of US industry, this blazingly stupid bill would have the effect of blocking or interfering with most oil exploration in Alaska, including the ANWR that Bush wants to drill -- it's not a direct part of the bill, just another side effect of making anything from GPS devices to electronic automobile ignitions to mapping software to modern radio equipment illegal. Down here in the Unfrozen South (Lower 48 except for places like North Dakota, Montana, and the Rockies) we can get by without as much of that equipment, but doing oil exploration by dogsled is pretty limiting.
Whichever position he takes on the bill, it'd be really easy to roast him over the coals for how the bill's blatant cluelessness interferes with it, and since much of Alaska's economy depends on oil, that should get his attention.
Many corporations search bags (not usually thoroughly) when people enter or leave their buildings. They're mainly worried about people stealing stuff, and about people bringing in things they'll argue about the ownership of when they leave (laptops, etc.), and some are paranoid about cameras because people could photograph sensitive material.But you're working at the National Institutes of Health -- like DUH! When there's a biological warfare panic going on, it's not surprising they'd be especially worried about people bringing dangerous germs home from one of the places the government keeps them. You're lucky they don't make you shower on the way out the door.
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But many of us aren't PC developers - we're network hackers, or consultants, or router developers, and that PC on our desk is a communication tool maintained by some IT department that wants to make sure we can word-process, print, email, surf, dial up from the road, and fill out forms in a compatible fashion, so to them we're just Users. In that environment, most of them don't care what extra tools you use as long as you don't ask them for support and don't mess up the tools they do support in confusing ways. So sure, if you've got the disk space, install Cygwin and X and GNOME and EMACS, and just make sure that when you send the HR folks the Excel spreadsheet that says what projects you worked on this month and which customers to charge for it, you're using their favorite macros and column headings. And use that other removable disk drive tray to run Linux with WINE on top :-)
The hard part is to find creative ways to get the public, and maybe the politicans, to understand what evil things the politicians are doing. I don't understand the local attitudes in your areas well enough to say what are the best ways to present your case. Some ideas I can think of:
- You are trying to research the evils that the Nazis did during the War, and you are trying to research the evils that remaining Nazis are doing today, and these internet censors are making it hard to locate the evildoers. Or you help organizations that watch Nazis to find them on the web, but the censorship makes it difficult.
- The censorship tools are forcing the current Nazis to use higher technology - bad enough that those partially-literate thugs are using the Internet, but now the censors are giving them a reason to learn more technology which they will use to organize their evil groups in secrecy, instead of more public locations where they can be found.
- Perhaps you have Internet services that you want to prevent Nazis from using, but it is difficult to identify the Nazis because of the censorship.
- Perhaps the censorship is hiding other things, not just Nazis - Former Stasi? Corruption? Lazy Police? The only way to know is to permit transparency.
Some of these approaches require you to be actively working on Nazi-hunting to be credible; some of them only require you to care about censorship or about making it easy for other people to fight Nazis. You will have to find your own path here.Occasionally you'll find a web page that's got several hundred KB of actual text, but it's usually not that way - most of the bits are decorative GIFs or JPGs which your modem won't compress. So you've got to pay attention to it upfront - use image formats that are already compressed (compare GIFs, JPGs, newer formats like DjVu, different resolutions), and pay attention to how much you want to clutter up the pages with them. Are they fundamental content? Nice but could be lighter weight? Unnecessary clutter when you could use a nice solid-color background instead? How often do you reuse them? Can you cache them effectively, either in the user's browser or ISP, or does the browser think each one of those customized bullets is a different dynamically generated file that it needs to download?
Really, the Bush Administration has no plans to just pick up and move other countries by tweaking their GPS coordinates on occasion. Hey, French Elections this week - let's shove them a couple feet to the right - that'll show'em Austrian right-wingers causing bad press? No problem, now the same guys are a bit farther left. Belgian EU Bureaucrats acting up? Relocate them to the English Channel, or reset their clocks back a few years before they were elected, and they'll go back home. Piece of cake.
My building has 100Mbps LAN, though my laptop currently has a 10Mbps card since the 100Mbps dongle broke (:-), but the connection to the outside world is only a T1 (1.5Mbps, symmetric), and it's more than enough bandwidth to get huge Powerpoint presentations from those marketing folks at headquarters.
But offices are much different - wiring cubicles for Cat5 and running it back to a phone closet costs money, and hubs that can provide management services (for lots of users) as opposed to simple dumb hubs also costs money, and reconnecting the things every time you play the Shrinking Cubicle Space Game costs money. Especially now that wireless cards are $100 heading for ~$50, and good laptop 100baseT cards are $40, if you're not loading your network heavily, wireless is a big win.
It's not as strong a case if you're in a file-server-intensive environment, but for typical corporate use, 10 Mbps is enough for a lot of users doing email, printing, and web browsing plus their desktop-based apps. (Of course you'd run 100Mbps for a wired network, now that it's as cheap as 10Mbps.)
Wireless is also a really convenient approach for office telephones, as long as they don't interfere with wireless data connections, cell phones, microwave ovens, .... Eliminating Moves/Adds/Changes for phones is a big win.
Sometimes you have to attribute it to malice, sometimes to stupidity, sometimes to changes in technology.
802.11b wasn't much of a problem for Linux - the cards look about like an Ethernet card, with some extra frobs you can tweak if you want to (e.g. the so-called security features, and features that tell you how the RF sections are doing.) I'm told that 802.11a is much different - it expects much more driver support from the operating system, somewhat the same way that Winmodems do. Some of the chip and card makers are working on Linux driver support, but before using 802.11a you'll need to find out how much you really get from them, and when - they've got an obvious market priority to get Windows working first.
Their web site says that they've announced that ALPS will be using their chipset; I don't remember who else will be using it.
I suppose these days you'd use CD-R or DVDs....
Comdex isn't Interop, and it's been a long time since Interop was Interop either. The only good reason to haul a laptop around the show floor is to do 802.11 scanning. This is a huge show, and you're there to see the sights and pick up either information or trinkets from vendors, exchange business cards, and maybe get job interviews. Your PDA may be helpful, but your laptop is just dead weight.
Just in case there are any vendors who haven't figured out the hot giveaway items that will get people to stop by your booth this Comdex, it's obviously plastic bags for carrying around literature , t-shirts, CDs, and other trinkets from other vendors. It's really a sinister plot by the plastic bag makers.
Memory has become ridiculously large and cheap. 512MB boards are under $50. I'm sure there are people who need more than 1GB on a non-production machine (obviously production machines like database servers need all they can fit), but for most applications, by the time you need to fill the third memory slot on your box, you could just as well buy a new card that's 4X larger than the old one you're rolling out.
If you've only got two slots, you may have problems, but usually the main time you need the third slot is if you're upgrading a machine and want to keep the old memory as well. And sometimes you've got a board that doesn't have enough address lines or has a BIOS that doesn't understand them (my home machine *says* it can use 3x256MB memory, but it looks like I'll have to flash a new BIOS to do it, and so far 192MB has been plenty.) :-)
If you don't have something else special to do, like FPGA, you might as well keep the old RAM - doesn't hurt, and more memory is always usable as long as it doesn't force you to a lower speed. I recently added 512MB to a 128MB maachine at work, giving 640MB. Bill Gates says that ought to be enough for anybody
If you're trying to explore new coprocessor architectures, it's an interesting thing to try - certainly better than hanging coprocessors out on a PCI bus somewhere. Of course, these days, CPUs are fast enough that it's difficult to find applications that really need enough more horsepower than general-purpose processors can provide, but there are still enough edgy things to try that it could be worthwhile.
I first saw an early version of Acme when Rob Pike was giving a Plan 9 talk at Usenix (maybe Nashville? Maybe ~1990?)(Since Plan 9 uses Unicode, that's really 8 1/2 with a genuine 1/2 character...) I wasn't impressed so much with Acme, but Pike was mainly talking about it in the context that he'd tried to develop something that was much different from his previous Blit terminal window system, which was a pleasantly fast overlapping-windows system on a 68000 box. What really impressed me was the speed of the window system startup - he typed 81/2, hit return, and the window system was up and running in about the time it would take for a $ prompt to show up. His description of the environment was "Ken and I have spent 10 years studying things that window systems shouldn't do and we wrote one that doesn't do them." A bit ugly, but blazingly fast and lightweight. The window system was written in about 64KB of code; he compiled it during the talk (took a few seconds on the 680x0 Next hardware, and he commented that it was much faster on the Murray Hill Plan 9 CPU server cluster.)
So when you're talking about "forgiving third world debt", are you talking about the rich countries declaring that money they've indirectly given to their own arms dealers or poured down other ratholes to be bad debt? Or are you talking about governments in rich countries using tax money to pay off bankers for risky business investments? Or are you talking about bankers in rich countries who made loans for legitimate business activities that looked like there was some chance of being paid back becoming forbidden (by either their own or the third-world country's government) to collect from the borrowers if the business projects were successful? The latter kind of debt forgiveness would be the kiss of death for any third-world business (small or large) trying to get access to capital to expand their business, which would be a really bad thing for the world economy. The others are variations on governments conspiring to rip off taxpayers in both countries; your choice on that.
But if the third-world government wants to borrow more money, which they will, is that something you want to encourage?
CowboyNeal was walking into the laboratory,
when suddenly a shot rang out!......
The Safesurf MAPS rant complains about them stealth-blocking websites that may contain important information, and people won't know they're being censored. But they've got the technology wrong: MAPS doesn't block websites - they provide tools that are normally used for blocking emails and furthermore, sites that implement MAPS tools properly normally provide bouncegrams telling people they block how and why their email was rejected, so they can fix their problems. The only way a company like Safesurf would be "censored" by a MAPS-using mailbox service would be if they sent out email to people - and since they'd find out they had a problem the first time they tried to send mail, they could put a notice on their website about it and tell people who want followup communications from them how to contact them.
Furthermore, Safesurf's web site violates Safesurf's proposed law creating (and mixing up) civil and criminal penalties and tort liability for mislabeling or failing to label web sites. Their original proposal was more aggressive than their current one, but it still doesn't require any actual harm to any actual child, as long as there are graphic images on the site (logos and decorations may not be harmful, but they're graphics, so we're covered there.) Plaintiffs can sue if the site doesn't provide appropriate ratings labels on material severe enough to be potentially harmful to children. Certainly, any proposal to throw people in jail for what they write on the net is pretty severe, and could cause harm to children who write things without labeling them if such a law were passed, and telling kids that people want to do that kind of harm to them just for what they write, even if there's no law passed, can also be pretty scary. www.safesurf.com's label says
"CONTENT='(PICS-1.1 "http://www.classify.org/safesurf/" l r (SS~~000 1))'"
which if you look it up on the explanatory web site doesn't have any indication of what the rating means. It does point to a site that tells you how to download a ".rat" file into your browser, and if you open up that file with a text editor instead of installing it, the file indicates something about "all ages", but doesn't indicate whether it's appropriate or inappropriate for all ages, so that a web browser could be set to do the appropriate thing with it, though it clearly implies that the really scary material complained about above should be appropriate for all ages....
"http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-PICS-services" has more PICS explanations.
Update - their web page indicates that MAPS has now unblocked them.
*Obviously* you do the compression out near the cameras; anything else would be silly, with the possible exception of doing lightweight compression at the cameras and heavier-duty compression at a centralized server, if you're in a LAN / Metro area network where bandwidth is cheaper than distributing lots of hardware. But you still need to figure out what level of data transmission is realistic - "90KB/sec" is 720 kbps, which is half a T1 line. (As a telecom vendor, I'd be happy to sell you 1000 T1s or equivalent Internet or FrameRelay/ATM bandwidth :-), at least assuming you're in the US where I've got bandwidth to sell instead of subcontracting. But your problems are much different if you're trying to camerafy every FooBar Retail Store in North America vs. trying to camerafy every street corner in Toronto.) But do you really need this much? Most business video-conferencing is 384kbps or 128kbps,and even 64kbps can be surprisingly good, especially since you don't mind grayscale. This lets you use DSL or ISDN to connect your remote sites (or if your cameras are in groups, lets you put more cameras per T1 from each group going back to your central locations.) This also means that your central location (or locations, depending on your disaster recovery needs and your bandwidth-vs-operations needs) can get by with a much more realistic data connection - if there's any long-distance component to the communications, you'll be much happier buying an OC3 than an OC48 or GigE, though in a metro area, if there's dark fiber, it doesn't much matter what speed you run at.
Any video compression algorithms worth using for this kind of application do comparisons from one frame to the next, and only compress the differences (except for occasional reference frames.) Some of them do substantial motion compensation to model the differences, others don't. Many of them let you tweak the frequency of reference frames - is it every 10? Every 100? Do you need the ability to go backwards, or is smooth forward and clunky backwards good enough?
Very few locations actually generate much motion on a 24-hour basis, except for road traffic cameras, and I'd be extremely surprised to see an application need to store those on a long-term basis (as opposed to storing for a week or so in case there are traffic accidents - anything you need longer than that should probably be handled by license-plate recognizers.)
OK, it's clearly not what was intended :-) But use the same bicycle pump pressure mechanism to push the jet fuel / gasoline / whatever out to the nozzle and let it burn there.
Actually, there may be some components that are worth using, but ActiveX is a security nightmare, and my experience with applications saving their information in the Registry instead of .ini files is that it becomes unmaintainable for the users, because MS designed the Registry to only be accessible by programmers and people willing to risk using Regedit, so you can't easily copy the configurations from one machine to another or back them up.
:-)
Please don't rate this "Flamebait" - I already dropped the +1 Karma Bonus myself to reflect that
their primary jobs are email, writing text/presentations/spreadsheets, doing forms on the web, getting information off the web, and other communications jobs.
The Registry is a terribly annoying system built to obfuscate application and configuration information and make it hard to move between machines. And tools that hide drivers in among the operating system guts have similar problems. If you wanted a clean environment, you wouldn't be using Windows.
There are lots of sales people, and individualized attention doesn't scale well.
Personnel turnover is relatively high, as great sales people get stolen by the competition or customers, the competition's great sales people get stolen by us, bad or unlucky sales people don't make quota and get booted, and in general they want to minimize training costs for computer platform tools, focusing the training on directly-business-related tools.
The standard computing environment is Microsoft, which means that Bad Things happen to it fairly often, and the most effective repair methods are destructive - save the user's files and wipe the computing environment.
A surprising number of tools can be developed as Excel and Word macros or other things that don't look like installing new programs.
All of this looks entirely unlike developers.
The really tough part for most sales people is supporting individual productivity tools that haven't yet received corporate support - everybody figured out Palm Pilot support really fast, Visio was a bit slower, and Dragon Dictate and some of the contact managers aren't widely used.
Does this suck for me? Yes, because I'm not just a user - I install all kinds of cool stuff off the net, partly because of the productivity win of having my personal email and environment on the machine I carry on the road with me instead of one system at home and one laptop for work, and I can read my personal email on the train.
Whichever position he takes on the bill, it'd be really easy to roast him over the coals for how the bill's blatant cluelessness interferes with it, and since much of Alaska's economy depends on oil, that should get his attention.
Many corporations search bags (not usually thoroughly) when people enter or leave their buildings. They're mainly worried about people stealing stuff, and about people bringing in things they'll argue about the ownership of when they leave (laptops, etc.), and some are paranoid about cameras because people could photograph sensitive material.But you're working at the National Institutes of Health -- like DUH! When there's a biological warfare panic going on, it's not surprising they'd be especially worried about people bringing dangerous germs home from one of the places the government keeps them. You're lucky they don't make you shower on the way out the door.