The NYTimes just ran an article about this exact subject, and it turns out that only black recruits made more in their lifetime when it included military service.
No other segment of society did, though some did make more for a short time before fading.
Oh, and in the military you may have to kill people, or might die, as part of the job. Something to think about.
First, its set up in such a way that it has no fiscal impact for the next few (2? 3?) years. The finance charges are rolled into the bond issuance so it requires no cash.
Second, the money it kicks out will largely go to California business activity, which gets taxed, sending some of the money right back where it came from.
Third, it proposes that through interests in any discoveries it is self-funding.
Whether you believe the second and third points or not (and the jury is definitely out here...), the first point is not up for debate - 71 has no impact right now, and will not for some time.
I don't drive hardly at all either, so I don't really care, but we're nerds, and nerds like facts, right?
I downloaded the "diction" package (I found a source RPM from the PLD distribution using rpmfind.net - needed a little.spec file tweak but then worked fine on RH9).
I installed it, and lo and behold, I still suffer from excessive-passivitis. I always had that problem when I was in situations where my literary output was being graded, and it appears I haven't gotten over it.
So what I'm thinking is, why isn't there a thunderbird plugin that does style analysis, where you could have it analyze email pre-send and set thresholds to warn you when you're writing at too high a level or your sentences are all passive.
This little thread makes me think you were being disingenuous when you said "I am in no way involved in spam activities"
You were involved in spam activities - you allowed spammers to use sub-domains off a domain you control.
I imagine you have emails from godaddy somewhere in some mailbox where they tried to contact you, the connection didn't happen, and then they yanked you.
Which is just a long way of applying the old axiom "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity". Not saying your stupid, just saying there was probably a config error that didn't get the mail to you in time to prevent the domain from getting yanked.
Not to be a fanboy, but I'm going to be a fanboy for a second:-)
That was an excellent rebuttal. Gotta love the 1-handle on the course number.
Come on, how many of us/.'ers wouldn't take public transit if it was free and gas cost $20/gallon. Duh. Of course we'd want our H2's back (demand), but the price wouldn't allow anyone but the foolish or ultra-rich to do it.
A lot of people are saying speakeasy is great, and I've got a friend that's used them forever, and they have treated him well.
I've personally been using megapath (SDSL 1/1) for around 4 years now, and I've found that my experience matches the speakeasy folks. Megapath's tech support is astoundingly good (3 rings, phone's picked up, first line tech is working on the router checking things for you, etc, usually). It doesn't go down, and the speeds are what they say they are and don't get bogged down. No nasty usage letters.
I recognize I sound like a shill, but you can check dslreports.com and see their rating - they really are good.
AFAIK - this is a simple trick for a combination of RSS gateways and an RSS aggregrator client.
I know there is already an RSS NNTP gateway, so if you could take also do an RSS SMTP gateway, and get your favorite forum place to RSS on their actual forum posts (not just their articles) you could maybe funnel them all into an NNTP client.
I hesitate to reply, because its obviously hopeless, but I've got to say, I'm either missing some intended humor on your part, or you're simply not being rational.
And this is the point where I cease trying to explain myself and let you troll along by yourself...
Let me see if I can give you a real life example of bulk emailing that is positive.
Let's say that your company starts a leadership training program.
Let's say that you can go to a website, take a leadership skills test, and if you want information on resources related to the things you need improvement on, you can sign up for updates.
Later, a new resource is added to the site, helping you with your leadership abilities.
You're not the only user though. 1,000 people have signed up for it. We'll send them all a quick mail with the URL.
Gosh, that sounds so evil doesn't it?
I'm going to refrain from ad hominem attacks and give you one VERY strong admonishment: refrain from knee-jerk reactions.
It'll help the level of discourse.
Now, to get on topic, I was strongly considering implementing a challenge/response system, then I realized that even if you disregard the crappy sender experience, its a crappy receiver experience for bulk mail you want. Like, say, J2EE Tech Tips from java.sun.com or bugtraq. I get a lot of things like that, and adding a new white-list entry manually whenever I subscribe would be a pain.
I think the web-of-trust idea with a C/R fallback and a report of C/R failures that was maybe Bayesian filtered itself (to save time during review) is maybe the ideal. A big combo, basically.
I guess I was thinking about an implicit tradeoff between "we can't offer this service" or, "we can offer this service, but we're going to proxy you in order to put rate limiting on".
That wasn't written out anywhere, and its unclear whether the ISP in question advertises their mail setup and its proxy behavior.
From my perspective as a smalltime SMTP admin, if I was given fair warning of a proxy and it was explained to me (truthfully) exactly what it does, I wouldn't have an issue with it. I would see it as a positive actually, since my netblock would have a correspondingly low chance of ending up in blackhole lists.
Doing a proxy of any sort silently seems a bit off though, I'll grant that.
I'd give him the benefit of the doubt and hope that "transparently" proxy means "we really didn't change a single thing, we just sent the traffic through here so we could do the throttling and queue it, and that was it"
Perhaps that's a security problem, but then, STMP over SSL would solve it, so what's the problem? On the face of it, this does seem like a really good solution
I'm sure I'm not the only person that quite playing Quake III because of the cheating due to proxy bots, etc.
How to stop it?
The usual problem is that the client software is untrusted, so you can't do anything unless you take a netrek like approach and design the game with non-instant weapons and then clamp down data transfer so bots can't see more than humans and perfect aim doesn't help.
That sucks because it doesn't reward good aim, and we're limiting weapon design due to some technological limitation instead of a legitimate game play problem.
What if you changed the equation and made the client software trustable?
My proposal would be to have the game engine take a dynamically loadable module for the networking and security checks.
Have the module by crypto-summed and verifiable, have it verify the client, and have it control the network interaction (all encrypted itself).
Now set the server up to generate these modules on the fly for each map, and force the player to download it on each map cycle, thus getting a new encryption seed/key to protect the network tunnel (no more proxy bots!), and constantly verifying the client (no client side hacks!)
I think this is a lot of hand-waving, and may not be possible, but OTOH, it might be. What would be left to do to plant a seed of trusted code on the client and then leverage it to trust the whole client?
The Whole Life Plan vs. The Split Life Plan
on
The Monk and the Riddle
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I read this book, and while I thought it was a bit "fluffy", perhaps I've just read too many technical tomes.
One thing that I got out of it and really enjoyed (its the riddle they mention) was the tension between two life plans that people adopt - the Whole Life Plan and the Split Life Plan.
The premise is that some people put off doing all the things that they want to do because they don't have money. They work for money, and will get to what they want later.
Others find a way to make money doing what they want, then they enjoy the whole journey - there is no "later" because they're doing what they want now.
The essence of the book is about one man's journey from the split life plan to a more balanced whole life situation, and in that sense its almost a typical coming of age story.
What I haven't fully resolved yet (and why I enjoyed the book - as its riddle stayed on my mind) is how to get myself more on a whole life plan. I'm not sure about you, but I'm delaying some things I want to do right now in order to work more, in the hopes that working more now will let me work less and play more later. I enjoy my work very much, just not to the exclusion of things that take money but don't make any.
I'm not sure if I'll reach the enlightened naked hippie frolicking joyful stage of total Whole Lifeness, whatever that is, but I have made some changes in my day-to-day routines that were geared towards moving farther from the split-life part of the spectrum. As a mental outlook, I think that's pretty positive, and I'm more fun to be around when I'm in that frame of mind.
So, not a bad book, though if it took more than a few hours to blow through it maybe wouldn't be worth it.
I actually corresponded with the guy somewhat, he's very scientific, knowledgable, and motivated to make it work (its his job) so his results are credible.
I followed the pattern and now have a tower with 2 IDE channels on the mobo, 2 promise cards, and two cards with CMD IDE chips in them. I have a couple of CD drives as hda and hdb, then 9 81GB Maxtor drives, each one as the master disk on a primary or secondary interface.
Then I used software RAID 5 on Linux-2.4, and believe it or not (I haven't run the tests in a while, but they were rigorous), I can nearly saturate my 100baseT network with data while reading, or store data quickly enough to keep up with the network. Formatted with ext2, this is a 614GB array.
It looks like the page has been updated recently though, as the I75Raid machine he was working on (>1TB) now has screaming performance, where he was having some problems before.
Other than hot-swappable hard drives, there's simply no reason to pay for SCSI any more, that I can see. This guys performance looks like it stand up to a 1000baseT network and not suffer too badly.
Check this out. This has the requirement that your company has options trading on its stock, but it works.
You have options, they are deep in the money, but you are restricted from selling. You think the stock may fall, or hell, you just want to diversify.
But you're locked.
So buy some out-of-the-money puts, and sell some at-the-money calls (to pay for the puts), and poof, with the zen of the spread, you have locked yourself into a tidy little profit.
When your options mature, you'll have the stock in hand to make your options position whole, and you're out.
Wish I had this problem to deal with;-). The moral of the story is to talk with a financial professional though. They have an astonishingly large bag of tricks.
I'd actually agree with you there - the slashdot ID thing was what generated the "Hilarious" I put in the subject. When I saw that it was 4 vs zip on the stairstep I pictured a group of aging Linux zealots (possibly bearded? witness LKML April fools posting describing Dirty GNU Hippies) going after some hot shot young network punk.
Barring some statistically significant correlation between length of time on/. and general knowledge of networking, I'd believe it has no bearing
However, I'd speculate that length of time/. does have a correlation on fervor of defense in linux-critical articles and comments, of which this stairstep was one. That cracked me up.
I dig the 638 though - I prostrate myself before your greater/. glory;-)
As an aside, I thought it was entirely funny watching that stairstep. Did you notice that you got totally outgunned on slashdot IDs? Every single person trying to reason with you had been around for longer than you, and you're id indicates you're no slouch.
Anyway, it appears from the FAQ, the RFCs, and the circumstantial evidence of major vendors providing bug-fix patches for this thing that its not a "deny by default" thing like blocking HTML tags, its a real-deal out-of-spec problem, and networking vendors need to get their act together.
I didn't enable that option though, so I don't particularly care either way...
Its also important to note (for those that don't read the insanely useful Kernel Traffic that Rik had a good point, the LKML admin person eventually agreed with him, and they worked out an alternate solution.
Ahhh, open source. Its a bit messy, but works out nicely in the end more often than not...
So, I'd extrapolate and give them the benefit of the doubt on the ECN thing. They appear to be quite reasonable when presented with coherent arguments.
If I were a developer, I would get a bunch more excited about a locked-down Linux console platform than a Linux-on-the-desktop platform.
Heck, even die-hard geeks get annoyed with libc upgrades and the like, and who knows whether you can get a high-performance game running on a Linux system that's been geeked out on for more than a year. The library mish-mash could be frightening.
Along with the constraints of not being able to upgrade the console easily, you get the freedom of not worrying about installs, and not worrying about incompatibilities. That clears two of the major hurdles Linux has, leaving you with mostly pros on the balance of things.
Is that enticing enough? I doubt it. The whole gaming thing seems to run on huge piles of money and that's one thing open source is not good at. (Could be a blessing in disguise, actually...). However, I think its fun to watch, and apparently others do too, as the Indrema popularity has shown.
...so I may have some real numbers to add. I'm also the CIO, CFO and a couple of other "C" and "O" titles - I'm pretty much just a coding nut that got into this out of necessity, but I wanted the subject to stand out:-).
First I'll say that we (h3c.com) are by no means large, but several people have contracted through us so we've been through this deal.
Second, I'll say that people contracting through the company are usually friends, so its in my best interests to give them a good, fair deal. That means I keep overhead down and stuff, and so may not factor in what other people do.
Third, I don't find jobs for people, just give them direct deposit, a liability shield, direct client billing, and I do all the taxes.
All that said, you now know where I'm coming from. So what does the company take?
Its not worth my time if I can't take at least 23%. I'll lose money otherwise, much less make a profit. That's because we have a roughly 1.5% San Francisco payroll tax, Social Security, Medicare, California payroll taxes, fees our payroll service charges us, etc., etc. It works out to roughly 23% being the point where I can finally guarantee that I won't lose money.
If I were to do this all of this beauracratic work for someone that was an acquantaince, but not a close friend, I'd probably want 25-30% depending on the billing rate to pay for my time, and if I provided benefits, found jobs, etc., etc the percentage would likely be much higher.
My numbers should give you a good idea of what the floor is though - it can't really go below the 23% number and get me interested.
I'd agree with the idea that IBM was still a mover and a shaker if the context was still in mainframe computing, but have you ever tried websphere?
It is, by far, the worst application server I've ever worked on, including ColdFusion. (At least ColdFusion did what it said it does without breaking). That takes them out of the mover and shaker league in my book, as a solid application server is not that difficult to code up, but is very necessary for middle ware going forward.
DB2 could use something as easy as PL/SQL as well, but that's a minor point compared to the loathing that I've developed for WebSphere over the last few months of building a massive e-commerce site on it.
That last point gets it back on topic as well, if we're talking about high-end databases, I'd put my money behind Oracle given lots of past experience - I think other posts sum it up well. I don't think DB2 is worth the same amount of money though, and IBM disagrees - so I'd vote with my wallet and send the bucks to Oracle.
There really is no substitute for stored procedures, tight/fine-grained transaction control and database-generated sequences.
I think he's got a good question. Notice your google search didn't show anything?
I'm not sure this has been done before - there really is no information out there that I could find, but its a great idea. It probably just isn't useful to non-geeks because who has more than 6GB of mp3s?
This is pretty niche, but it would be incredible if it worked...
o Google. Nothing. Zilch. Just lots of reviews.
o mp3board.com. No discussion of hacking.
o deja.com. Useless these days, nothin' doin'.
So I'm curious, make that *very* curious. Does anyone have one of these? Opened it up? Examine the hard drive? I have a laptop, and it can take multiple hard drives...perhaps if I could mount the hard drive from the PJB, get a bigger one, copy the old files to the big one...?
Has *anyone* hacked around with this beast? Can you imagine the potential of a 25GB (my laptop drive) or bigger MP3 player?
Post any info please!
Re:Thank you - for killing off QW community
on
Quake 1 GPL'ed
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· Score: 1
You know, now that you have the source, maybe you could come up with a really good remote-client verification system? Something secure, etc, that let you run a server that only worked with a distribution of the client you prepared.
There's probably a way to do it, so if you want it so badly that you'd like the world to end you probably wouldn't mind spending a couple of months figuring it out.
If the system was good enough, you might even be able to convince id to use it in the future so you have your precious gaming purity back.
You're kidding right? Coldfusion has some of the lamest control-flow I've ever seen in a "programming language". Where's my switch? Nesting is a pain. Defining and calling functions (cfmodules, whatever) is a pain.
I recommend a real language, like Perl or PHP or JSP or anything but ColdFusion. I had to do ColdFusion for 6 months and I just about went nuts.
Slashdot Mirror
The NYTimes just ran an article about this exact subject, and it turns out that only black recruits made more in their lifetime when it included military service.
No other segment of society did, though some did make more for a short time before fading.
Oh, and in the military you may have to kill people, or might die, as part of the job. Something to think about.
Did you read proposition 71? I did.
First, its set up in such a way that it has no fiscal impact for the next few (2? 3?) years. The finance charges are rolled into the bond issuance so it requires no cash.
Second, the money it kicks out will largely go to California business activity, which gets taxed, sending some of the money right back where it came from.
Third, it proposes that through interests in any discoveries it is self-funding.
Whether you believe the second and third points or not (and the jury is definitely out here...), the first point is not up for debate - 71 has no impact right now, and will not for some time.
I don't drive hardly at all either, so I don't really care, but we're nerds, and nerds like facts, right?
So here's an honest question.
.spec file tweak but then worked fine on RH9).
I downloaded the "diction" package (I found a source RPM from the PLD distribution using rpmfind.net - needed a little
I installed it, and lo and behold, I still suffer from excessive-passivitis. I always had that problem when I was in situations where my literary output was being graded, and it appears I haven't gotten over it.
So what I'm thinking is, why isn't there a thunderbird plugin that does style analysis, where you could have it analyze email pre-send and set thresholds to warn you when you're writing at too high a level or your sentences are all passive.
Does such a beast exist?
This little thread makes me think you were being disingenuous when you said "I am in no way involved in spam activities"
You were involved in spam activities - you allowed spammers to use sub-domains off a domain you control.
I imagine you have emails from godaddy somewhere in some mailbox where they tried to contact you, the connection didn't happen, and then they yanked you.
Which is just a long way of applying the old axiom "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity". Not saying your stupid, just saying there was probably a config error that didn't get the mail to you in time to prevent the domain from getting yanked.
Not to be a fanboy, but I'm going to be a fanboy for a second :-)
/.'ers wouldn't take public transit if it was free and gas cost $20/gallon. Duh. Of course we'd want our H2's back (demand), but the price wouldn't allow anyone but the foolish or ultra-rich to do it.
That was an excellent rebuttal. Gotta love the 1-handle on the course number.
Come on, how many of us
A lot of people are saying speakeasy is great, and I've got a friend that's used them forever, and they have treated him well.
I've personally been using megapath (SDSL 1/1) for around 4 years now, and I've found that my experience matches the speakeasy folks. Megapath's tech support is astoundingly good (3 rings, phone's picked up, first line tech is working on the router checking things for you, etc, usually). It doesn't go down, and the speeds are what they say they are and don't get bogged down. No nasty usage letters.
I recognize I sound like a shill, but you can check dslreports.com and see their rating - they really are good.
AFAIK - this is a simple trick for a combination of RSS gateways and an RSS aggregrator client.
I know there is already an RSS NNTP gateway, so if you could take also do an RSS SMTP gateway, and get your favorite forum place to RSS on their actual forum posts (not just their articles) you could maybe funnel them all into an NNTP client.
Or similar - you get the idea...
I hesitate to reply, because its obviously hopeless, but I've got to say, I'm either missing some intended humor on your part, or you're simply not being rational.
And this is the point where I cease trying to explain myself and let you troll along by yourself...
Oh my, did you even read his post?
Let me see if I can give you a real life example of bulk emailing that is positive.
Let's say that your company starts a leadership training program.
Let's say that you can go to a website, take a leadership skills test, and if you want information on resources related to the things you need improvement on, you can sign up for updates.
Later, a new resource is added to the site, helping you with your leadership abilities.
You're not the only user though. 1,000 people have signed up for it. We'll send them all a quick mail with the URL.
Gosh, that sounds so evil doesn't it?
I'm going to refrain from ad hominem attacks and give you one VERY strong admonishment: refrain from knee-jerk reactions.
It'll help the level of discourse.
Now, to get on topic, I was strongly considering implementing a challenge/response system, then I realized that even if you disregard the crappy sender experience, its a crappy receiver experience for bulk mail you want. Like, say, J2EE Tech Tips from java.sun.com or bugtraq. I get a lot of things like that, and adding a new white-list entry manually whenever I subscribe would be a pain.
I think the web-of-trust idea with a C/R fallback and a report of C/R failures that was maybe Bayesian filtered itself (to save time during review) is maybe the ideal. A big combo, basically.
Ahh - I definitely see your point.
I guess I was thinking about an implicit tradeoff between "we can't offer this service" or, "we can offer this service, but we're going to proxy you in order to put rate limiting on".
That wasn't written out anywhere, and its unclear whether the ISP in question advertises their mail setup and its proxy behavior.
From my perspective as a smalltime SMTP admin, if I was given fair warning of a proxy and it was explained to me (truthfully) exactly what it does, I wouldn't have an issue with it. I would see it as a positive actually, since my netblock would have a correspondingly low chance of ending up in blackhole lists.
Doing a proxy of any sort silently seems a bit off though, I'll grant that.
I'd give him the benefit of the doubt and hope that "transparently" proxy means "we really didn't change a single thing, we just sent the traffic through here so we could do the throttling and queue it, and that was it"
Perhaps that's a security problem, but then, STMP over SSL would solve it, so what's the problem? On the face of it, this does seem like a really good solution
How to stop it?
The usual problem is that the client software is untrusted, so you can't do anything unless you take a netrek like approach and design the game with non-instant weapons and then clamp down data transfer so bots can't see more than humans and perfect aim doesn't help.
That sucks because it doesn't reward good aim, and we're limiting weapon design due to some technological limitation instead of a legitimate game play problem.
What if you changed the equation and made the client software trustable?
My proposal would be to have the game engine take a dynamically loadable module for the networking and security checks.
Have the module by crypto-summed and verifiable, have it verify the client, and have it control the network interaction (all encrypted itself).
Now set the server up to generate these modules on the fly for each map, and force the player to download it on each map cycle, thus getting a new encryption seed/key to protect the network tunnel (no more proxy bots!), and constantly verifying the client (no client side hacks!)
I think this is a lot of hand-waving, and may not be possible, but OTOH, it might be. What would be left to do to plant a seed of trusted code on the client and then leverage it to trust the whole client?
I read this book, and while I thought it was a bit "fluffy", perhaps I've just read too many technical tomes.
One thing that I got out of it and really enjoyed (its the riddle they mention) was the tension between two life plans that people adopt - the Whole Life Plan and the Split Life Plan.
The premise is that some people put off doing all the things that they want to do because they don't have money. They work for money, and will get to what they want later.
Others find a way to make money doing what they want, then they enjoy the whole journey - there is no "later" because they're doing what they want now.
The essence of the book is about one man's journey from the split life plan to a more balanced whole life situation, and in that sense its almost a typical coming of age story.
What I haven't fully resolved yet (and why I enjoyed the book - as its riddle stayed on my mind) is how to get myself more on a whole life plan. I'm not sure about you, but I'm delaying some things I want to do right now in order to work more, in the hopes that working more now will let me work less and play more later. I enjoy my work very much, just not to the exclusion of things that take money but don't make any.
I'm not sure if I'll reach the enlightened naked hippie frolicking joyful stage of total Whole Lifeness, whatever that is, but I have made some changes in my day-to-day routines that were geared towards moving farther from the split-life part of the spectrum. As a mental outlook, I think that's pretty positive, and I'm more fun to be around when I'm in that frame of mind.
So, not a bad book, though if it took more than a few hours to blow through it maybe wouldn't be worth it.
Linux IDE Raid
I actually corresponded with the guy somewhat, he's very scientific, knowledgable, and motivated to make it work (its his job) so his results are credible.
I followed the pattern and now have a tower with 2 IDE channels on the mobo, 2 promise cards, and two cards with CMD IDE chips in them. I have a couple of CD drives as hda and hdb, then 9 81GB Maxtor drives, each one as the master disk on a primary or secondary interface.
Then I used software RAID 5 on Linux-2.4, and believe it or not (I haven't run the tests in a while, but they were rigorous), I can nearly saturate my 100baseT network with data while reading, or store data quickly enough to keep up with the network. Formatted with ext2, this is a 614GB array.
It looks like the page has been updated recently though, as the I75Raid machine he was working on (>1TB) now has screaming performance, where he was having some problems before.
Other than hot-swappable hard drives, there's simply no reason to pay for SCSI any more, that I can see. This guys performance looks like it stand up to a 1000baseT network and not suffer too badly.
You have options, they are deep in the money, but you are restricted from selling. You think the stock may fall, or hell, you just want to diversify.
But you're locked.
So buy some out-of-the-money puts, and sell some at-the-money calls (to pay for the puts), and poof, with the zen of the spread, you have locked yourself into a tidy little profit.
When your options mature, you'll have the stock in hand to make your options position whole, and you're out.
The beauty of the costless collar.
Wish I had this problem to deal with ;-). The moral of the story is to talk with a financial professional though. They have an astonishingly large bag of tricks.
Barring some statistically significant correlation between length of time on /. and general knowledge of networking, I'd believe it has no bearing
However, I'd speculate that length of time /. does have a correlation on fervor of defense in linux-critical articles and comments, of which this stairstep was one. That cracked me up.
I dig the 638 though - I prostrate myself before your greater /. glory ;-)
Here's a link for ya. LKML FAQ on ECN. Nifty.
As an aside, I thought it was entirely funny watching that stairstep. Did you notice that you got totally outgunned on slashdot IDs? Every single person trying to reason with you had been around for longer than you, and you're id indicates you're no slouch.
Anyway, it appears from the FAQ, the RFCs, and the circumstantial evidence of major vendors providing bug-fix patches for this thing that its not a "deny by default" thing like blocking HTML tags, its a real-deal out-of-spec problem, and networking vendors need to get their act together.
I didn't enable that option though, so I don't particularly care either way...
Ahhh, open source. Its a bit messy, but works out nicely in the end more often than not...
So, I'd extrapolate and give them the benefit of the doubt on the ECN thing. They appear to be quite reasonable when presented with coherent arguments.
Heck, even die-hard geeks get annoyed with libc upgrades and the like, and who knows whether you can get a high-performance game running on a Linux system that's been geeked out on for more than a year. The library mish-mash could be frightening.
Along with the constraints of not being able to upgrade the console easily, you get the freedom of not worrying about installs, and not worrying about incompatibilities. That clears two of the major hurdles Linux has, leaving you with mostly pros on the balance of things.
Is that enticing enough? I doubt it. The whole gaming thing seems to run on huge piles of money and that's one thing open source is not good at. (Could be a blessing in disguise, actually...). However, I think its fun to watch, and apparently others do too, as the Indrema popularity has shown.
0.02
First I'll say that we (h3c.com) are by no means large, but several people have contracted through us so we've been through this deal.
Second, I'll say that people contracting through the company are usually friends, so its in my best interests to give them a good, fair deal. That means I keep overhead down and stuff, and so may not factor in what other people do.
Third, I don't find jobs for people, just give them direct deposit, a liability shield, direct client billing, and I do all the taxes.
All that said, you now know where I'm coming from. So what does the company take?
Its not worth my time if I can't take at least 23%. I'll lose money otherwise, much less make a profit. That's because we have a roughly 1.5% San Francisco payroll tax, Social Security, Medicare, California payroll taxes, fees our payroll service charges us, etc., etc. It works out to roughly 23% being the point where I can finally guarantee that I won't lose money.
If I were to do this all of this beauracratic work for someone that was an acquantaince, but not a close friend, I'd probably want 25-30% depending on the billing rate to pay for my time, and if I provided benefits, found jobs, etc., etc the percentage would likely be much higher.
My numbers should give you a good idea of what the floor is though - it can't really go below the 23% number and get me interested.
I'd agree with the idea that IBM was still a mover and a shaker if the context was still in mainframe computing, but have you ever tried websphere?
It is, by far, the worst application server I've ever worked on, including ColdFusion. (At least ColdFusion did what it said it does without breaking). That takes them out of the mover and shaker league in my book, as a solid application server is not that difficult to code up, but is very necessary for middle ware going forward.
DB2 could use something as easy as PL/SQL as well, but that's a minor point compared to the loathing that I've developed for WebSphere over the last few months of building a massive e-commerce site on it.
That last point gets it back on topic as well, if we're talking about high-end databases, I'd put my money behind Oracle given lots of past experience - I think other posts sum it up well. I don't think DB2 is worth the same amount of money though, and IBM disagrees - so I'd vote with my wallet and send the bucks to Oracle.
There really is no substitute for stored procedures, tight/fine-grained transaction control and database-generated sequences.
I think he's got a good question. Notice your google search didn't show anything?
I'm not sure this has been done before - there really is no information out there that I could find, but its a great idea. It probably just isn't useful to non-geeks because who has more than 6GB of mp3s?
This is pretty niche, but it would be incredible if it worked...
Where did I search?
o Google. Nothing. Zilch. Just lots of reviews.
o mp3board.com. No discussion of hacking.
o deja.com. Useless these days, nothin' doin'.
So I'm curious, make that *very* curious. Does anyone have one of these? Opened it up? Examine the hard drive? I have a laptop, and it can take multiple hard drives...perhaps if I could mount the hard drive from the PJB, get a bigger one, copy the old files to the big one...?
Has *anyone* hacked around with this beast? Can you imagine the potential of a 25GB (my laptop drive) or bigger MP3 player?
Post any info please!
There's probably a way to do it, so if you want it so badly that you'd like the world to end you probably wouldn't mind spending a couple of months figuring it out.
If the system was good enough, you might even be able to convince id to use it in the future so you have your precious gaming purity back.
I recommend a real language, like Perl or PHP or JSP or anything but ColdFusion. I had to do ColdFusion for 6 months and I just about went nuts.