There will be less web browsing
on
Browsing Alone
·
· Score: 1
In Denmark, one of the countries with the most PCs per inhabitant in the world, the average amount of time spent on the internet has topped and people are today spending less time on the internet than a year ago.
Commercial Linux is about making money and unless Red Hat gets bought by AOL, they would probably lose market share to Mandrake and SuSE. And SuSE isn't too popular either.
If you want real a real Open-Source distribution, it's not Red Hat but Debian. But they don't hire.
Linus works for Transmeta, so why shouldn't Alan Cox work for AOL? He can always quit if he doesn't like his job.
I live in Denmark, and Linux is the only Danish language server operating system in the World. It's a real problem that you cannot get a Windows Terminal Server in a comprehensible language.
And so it is on a desktop, too. If there is no localized software for creating PDF-files on a Windows desktop, you have to hire somebody with knowledge of foreign languages, or get some other desktop that provides PDF functionality.
Try to imagine yourself operating a program made in finnish.
With Open Source, once somebody creates a localized piece of software, it will stay around for new users to use.
If you are a chinese and don't understand English, the only legal way to create pdf files on Windows now vanishes. The only way to create pdf files using localized software is to install an alternative OS and use ps2pdf.
On a Danish language website about Danish traditions, we got 0,24% Linux in 70,000 hits. Windows 95 was 15% and Windows 98 was 59%. Windows XP had 46 hits in total. Webmaster and webserver operators hits have been effectively removed from these statistics (both use Linux).
The audience is believed to be home users, schools and Danes living in other countries.
The server is behind a 25kbyte/sec line, so I won't give the URL here...:-)
I just bought a new house too (will be finished in may 2002), and my solution is quite simple: I will use a small room (8 m2) for office and make it air conditioned. Since I use Linux, I use the same 2xCPU computer as workstation, webserver, Tribes 2 server, cvs server, sftp server, Interbase server etc. Unless your internet connection to your home is extremely large, you will never need more than one server, and that server can also be your desktop.
I was self-employed and did freelance Windows support and programming. One of my friends, who I trust very much, told me to have a look at Linux. I didn't. Some time afterwards, he repeated himself, and since I trust him very much, I bought Red Hat Linux 5.0, but didn't get a clue about that, and I didn't have time enough to spend on it. I chose Red Hat because I called my webhotel and asked what they used, and they used Red Hat.
Later I found out a way to learn Linux: I set myself the goal to be able to set up a file and printer server, and then I would set up Linux-servers at some of my customers, earning money on servicing Linux-servers. It took some time to learn all the necessary stuff before I could administer Samba: File system, security, user administration etc. The first Linux I set up at my customers was a Red Hat 6.0.
After having set up a couple of file and printer servers I started to get more and more knowledge, and today I am the only system administrator on 18 servers at different companies and create all types of solutions for these companies. I spend less than 10% of my time on Windows now, and I find my job much more interesting now.
Some special tasks I have done since are:
- Troubleshooting Debian and Slackware installations.
- Helped a webhotel track down a hacker.
- Helped another webhotel structure their business.
- Certain administrative tasks on Siemens Nixdorf Unix (I think it's named Sinix).
- Troubleshooting a Voice-over-IP box that was based on SCO Unix.
The conclusion is: Define a configuration you would like to be able to administrate, like a Webserver or a file-server. When you have reached that goal, improve your skills. After that, set yourself a new goal. The rest is easy.
I lost interest in CS a long time ago, but I continue to be in CS, because that's how I make most money. Right now I just like to be able to do a good job, and in fact, it has been scientifically proved, that being productive makes happy workers, not the other way around.
So when you graduate, and got yourself a job, you will eventually find joy again. Maybe not CS itself, but getting the job done, nice collegues etc. CS itself can be a smaller part of your life than you imagine, even though you continue in it.
When you construct a house or a power plant, you are in a business with subcontractors, that can take some of the risks. It is generally accepted to set a fixed price, because the procedures that are involved, are mostly known.
In software, however, most projects do not rely on known procedures. It is fairly easy to estimate the costs of creating 1000 different window layouts, which is a known procedure, but it is a very difficult task to estimate the costs of implementing the layouts.
If software would use as much energy on estimating each new task as construction projects did, developing software would be extremely expensive. Just imagine that you had to do a while-loop according to an ISO standard, and another while loop according to another ISO standard, because the two while loops were in different functions that were categorized differently by a third ISO standard. Instead we hire a bunch of programmers and make them program themselves. Sometimes we do it a little more complicated, like Open-Source, Xtreme Programming etc., but it's still a bunch of programmers hacking around.
The trick is to manage it anyway - and that's why managing software projects will always be risc management and not very predictable.
In a competitive environment with humans involved, up to three can be specified. Not four. Good examples are:
- Many guidelines for managing software projects tell you to reduce quantity when you get near deadline.
- Some customers have a specified budget but really don't know how much software they can get for that money. They prefer to have costs fixed than to have quantity or deadline fixed.
- Sometimes deadline is so important, that costs may 10-double in order to reach that deadline, and quality and quantity may get reduced a lot in order to finish the project.
It is extremely important to realize the meaning of all four parameters before you can talk about estimating project schedules.
Lars.
Globalization is inevitable
on
Globalization
·
· Score: 1
Nobody can stop globalization, and discussing against it is so difficult for most people, that the discussion will die and turn to more manageable issues.
No - I'm not a bastard - I just hate when my internet connection stops working because of high load. Since the post wasn't moderated high, and since I wasn't flooded with e-mail, I will send the report to anybody upon request. And if somebody will publish it on a webpage, that would be great.
One of the most important things overlooked by all 4-point and 5-point posts in this thread is that you want to store it indefinitely. This means that you have to retrieve data after some time and rewrite it, since no media lasts forever.
When it comes to storage in these amounts, there is only one thing to do: make a spreadsheet with different product's total costs during the system lifetime, and remember to include the costs of regenerating data on outdated media in the future. And then choose the technology that has the lowest total cost of ownership.
I did a very thorough investigation on the performance of Tribes 2 for Windows on Windows 2000 and Lokigames Tribes 2 for Linux on Red Hat Linux 7.2. The results were that the Linux version achieved a 17% higher frame rate on the same hardware in those places, where my GeForce 2MX wasn't the bottleneck. The CPU was an Amd Athlon 1.2GHz.
I think this is really amazing, and shows how good a job Lokigames does.
Because I don't want the slashdot effect on my 256kbps webserver, I will only send the report to those, who:
- Have an @slashdot.org e-mail address.
- Have made a post with at least 4 points.
I upgraded my mom from Windows NT4 to RH7.1, and after the usual "why does it look different" she seems quite happy about being able to doubleclick everything in her mail inbox... and how many 62 year old women that invite to coffee talk with the neighbors tell about upgrading to Red Hat 7.2? Mine does!!!
RH 7.2 solves a real issue - sometimes (once a month) her harddisk stops working. A hardware error. ext3 makes it possible to start up again without runnin fsck manually. ext3 is the biggest stability improvement for the average end-user.
Nimda did go behind firewalls. It came in via e-mail or external consultants with laptops that attached to the LAN, and then attacked all intranet servers. As the story says, IIS is used for administering these servers, so they are indeed in a very vulnerable position and need to be patched.
75GXP harddrives have failed in so big masses that it is economically unwise to buy such a harddisk. As a harddisk vendor, we were warned by the distributor (to be unnamed here) each time we bought PC's with 75GXP harddisk in. Those harddisks were the only product they didn't ask about when we returned them for a replace.
It probably wasn't the world's largest Windows installation, but it was the world's largest installation of that version of Windows NT Servers. I don't remember the version, I think it was NT 3.1 or NT 3.5, at the danish institute for statistics.
Every time they added a new user, another user came in and said "I cannot log in". They reached the limit of users in the user database and had to wait for a patch from Microsoft before everybody could get into the domain!!!! Every time they added a user, another one was dropped from the user database.
Being self-employed, I have been able to change from making money on Windows programming to make money on Linux programming. I have never enjoyed my work so much!
Even a RAD/GUI tool like Borland Delphi (and Kylix) come with a CLI compiler. Without a CLI compiler, you cannot script a release process - but the GUI part is also necessary to deliver development performance. Just like using Emacs to edit C++ files instead of vi.
In earlier versions of Borlands Pascal compilers, constants were writable. Now they changed it (Kylix, Delphi 6) so that constants are readonly and variables (which are obviously writable) can be initialized, like in C/C++:
const a:integer=2;// Old syntax
var a:integer=2;// New syntax
If you look at the virus'es that have been made, many of them have destructive effects that were not intended originally. A virus or worm that spreads itself, might cause trouble just by spreading - activating firewall warning systems etc.
Passwords won't mean much when public/private key encryption in USB keys becomes normal, and the next step is to have things only viewed decrypted on a pocket computer, which makes is virtually impossible to bug or tap anything.
I wonder if somebody would port gpg to my Palm computer?
Slashdot Mirror
In Denmark, one of the countries with the most PCs per inhabitant in the world, the average amount of time spent on the internet has topped and people are today spending less time on the internet than a year ago.
Commercial Linux is about making money and unless Red Hat gets bought by AOL, they would probably lose market share to Mandrake and SuSE. And SuSE isn't too popular either.
If you want real a real Open-Source distribution, it's not Red Hat but Debian. But they don't hire.
Linus works for Transmeta, so why shouldn't Alan Cox work for AOL? He can always quit if he doesn't like his job.
I live in Denmark, and Linux is the only Danish language server operating system in the World. It's a real problem that you cannot get a Windows Terminal Server in a comprehensible language.
And so it is on a desktop, too. If there is no localized software for creating PDF-files on a Windows desktop, you have to hire somebody with knowledge of foreign languages, or get some other desktop that provides PDF functionality.
Try to imagine yourself operating a program made in finnish.
With Open Source, once somebody creates a localized piece of software, it will stay around for new users to use.
If you are a chinese and don't understand English, the only legal way to create pdf files on Windows now vanishes. The only way to create pdf files using localized software is to install an alternative OS and use ps2pdf.
On a Danish language website about Danish traditions, we got 0,24% Linux in 70,000 hits. Windows 95 was 15% and Windows 98 was 59%. Windows XP had 46 hits in total. Webmaster and webserver operators hits have been effectively removed from these statistics (both use Linux).
:-)
The audience is believed to be home users, schools and Danes living in other countries.
The server is behind a 25kbyte/sec line, so I won't give the URL here...
I just bought a new house too (will be finished in may 2002), and my solution is quite simple: I will use a small room (8 m2) for office and make it air conditioned. Since I use Linux, I use the same 2xCPU computer as workstation, webserver, Tribes 2 server, cvs server, sftp server, Interbase server etc. Unless your internet connection to your home is extremely large, you will never need more than one server, and that server can also be your desktop.
I was self-employed and did freelance Windows support and programming. One of my friends, who I trust very much, told me to have a look at Linux. I didn't. Some time afterwards, he repeated himself, and since I trust him very much, I bought Red Hat Linux 5.0, but didn't get a clue about that, and I didn't have time enough to spend on it. I chose Red Hat because I called my webhotel and asked what they used, and they used Red Hat.
Later I found out a way to learn Linux: I set myself the goal to be able to set up a file and printer server, and then I would set up Linux-servers at some of my customers, earning money on servicing Linux-servers. It took some time to learn all the necessary stuff before I could administer Samba: File system, security, user administration etc. The first Linux I set up at my customers was a Red Hat 6.0.
After having set up a couple of file and printer servers I started to get more and more knowledge, and today I am the only system administrator on 18 servers at different companies and create all types of solutions for these companies. I spend less than 10% of my time on Windows now, and I find my job much more interesting now.
Some special tasks I have done since are:
- Troubleshooting Debian and Slackware installations.
- Helped a webhotel track down a hacker.
- Helped another webhotel structure their business.
- Certain administrative tasks on Siemens Nixdorf Unix (I think it's named Sinix).
- Troubleshooting a Voice-over-IP box that was based on SCO Unix.
The conclusion is: Define a configuration you would like to be able to administrate, like a Webserver or a file-server. When you have reached that goal, improve your skills. After that, set yourself a new goal. The rest is easy.
My education is M.Sc.E.E.
I lost interest in CS a long time ago, but I continue to be in CS, because that's how I make most money. Right now I just like to be able to do a good job, and in fact, it has been scientifically proved, that being productive makes happy workers, not the other way around.
So when you graduate, and got yourself a job, you will eventually find joy again. Maybe not CS itself, but getting the job done, nice collegues etc. CS itself can be a smaller part of your life than you imagine, even though you continue in it.
When you construct a house or a power plant, you are in a business with subcontractors, that can take some of the risks. It is generally accepted to set a fixed price, because the procedures that are involved, are mostly known.
In software, however, most projects do not rely on known procedures. It is fairly easy to estimate the costs of creating 1000 different window layouts, which is a known procedure, but it is a very difficult task to estimate the costs of implementing the layouts.
If software would use as much energy on estimating each new task as construction projects did, developing software would be extremely expensive. Just imagine that you had to do a while-loop according to an ISO standard, and another while loop according to another ISO standard, because the two while loops were in different functions that were categorized differently by a third ISO standard. Instead we hire a bunch of programmers and make them program themselves. Sometimes we do it a little more complicated, like Open-Source, Xtreme Programming etc., but it's still a bunch of programmers hacking around.
The trick is to manage it anyway - and that's why managing software projects will always be risc management and not very predictable.
Lars.
There are four parameters to a software project:
- Quality
- Quantity
- Deadline
- Costs
In a competitive environment with humans involved, up to three can be specified. Not four. Good examples are:
- Many guidelines for managing software projects tell you to reduce quantity when you get near deadline.
- Some customers have a specified budget but really don't know how much software they can get for that money. They prefer to have costs fixed than to have quantity or deadline fixed.
- Sometimes deadline is so important, that costs may 10-double in order to reach that deadline, and quality and quantity may get reduced a lot in order to finish the project.
It is extremely important to realize the meaning of all four parameters before you can talk about estimating project schedules.
Lars.
Nobody can stop globalization, and discussing against it is so difficult for most people, that the discussion will die and turn to more manageable issues.
No - I'm not a bastard - I just hate when my internet connection stops working because of high load. Since the post wasn't moderated high, and since I wasn't flooded with e-mail, I will send the report to anybody upon request. And if somebody will publish it on a webpage, that would be great.
One of the most important things overlooked by all 4-point and 5-point posts in this thread is that you want to store it indefinitely. This means that you have to retrieve data after some time and rewrite it, since no media lasts forever.
When it comes to storage in these amounts, there is only one thing to do: make a spreadsheet with different product's total costs during the system lifetime, and remember to include the costs of regenerating data on outdated media in the future. And then choose the technology that has the lowest total cost of ownership.
I did a very thorough investigation on the performance of Tribes 2 for Windows on Windows 2000 and Lokigames Tribes 2 for Linux on Red Hat Linux 7.2. The results were that the Linux version achieved a 17% higher frame rate on the same hardware in those places, where my GeForce 2MX wasn't the bottleneck. The CPU was an Amd Athlon 1.2GHz.
I think this is really amazing, and shows how good a job Lokigames does.
Because I don't want the slashdot effect on my 256kbps webserver, I will only send the report to those, who:
- Have an @slashdot.org e-mail address.
- Have made a post with at least 4 points.
Lars.
I upgraded my mom from Windows NT4 to RH7.1, and after the usual "why does it look different" she seems quite happy about being able to doubleclick everything in her mail inbox... and how many 62 year old women that invite to coffee talk with the neighbors tell about upgrading to Red Hat 7.2? Mine does!!!
RH 7.2 solves a real issue - sometimes (once a month) her harddisk stops working. A hardware error. ext3 makes it possible to start up again without runnin fsck manually. ext3 is the biggest stability improvement for the average end-user.
Lars.
Nimda did go behind firewalls. It came in via e-mail or external consultants with laptops that attached to the LAN, and then attacked all intranet servers. As the story says, IIS is used for administering these servers, so they are indeed in a very vulnerable position and need to be patched.
75GXP harddrives have failed in so big masses that it is economically unwise to buy such a harddisk. As a harddisk vendor, we were warned by the distributor (to be unnamed here) each time we bought PC's with 75GXP harddisk in. Those harddisks were the only product they didn't ask about when we returned them for a replace.
It probably wasn't the world's largest Windows installation, but it was the world's largest installation of that version of Windows NT Servers. I don't remember the version, I think it was NT 3.1 or NT 3.5, at the danish institute for statistics.
Every time they added a new user, another user came in and said "I cannot log in". They reached the limit of users in the user database and had to wait for a patch from Microsoft before everybody could get into the domain!!!! Every time they added a user, another one was dropped from the user database.
Lars.
Being self-employed, I have been able to change from making money on Windows programming to make money on Linux programming. I have never enjoyed my work so much!
Lars.
It's very easy to stop Code Red - turn off the computer, call the ISP, and you are online again.
Lars.
There are certain things in Windows NT/2000, you cannot do without the command line - like synchronizing the time via NTP...
Lars.
Even a RAD/GUI tool like Borland Delphi (and Kylix) come with a CLI compiler. Without a CLI compiler, you cannot script a release process - but the GUI part is also necessary to deliver development performance. Just like using Emacs to edit C++ files instead of vi.
Lars.
In earlier versions of Borlands Pascal compilers, constants were writable. Now they changed it (Kylix, Delphi 6) so that constants are readonly and variables (which are obviously writable) can be initialized, like in C/C++:
// Old syntax
// New syntax
const a:integer=2;
var a:integer=2;
I wonder if they will change that back now...
If you look at the virus'es that have been made, many of them have destructive effects that were not intended originally. A virus or worm that spreads itself, might cause trouble just by spreading - activating firewall warning systems etc.
Passwords won't mean much when public/private key encryption in USB keys becomes normal, and the next step is to have things only viewed decrypted on a pocket computer, which makes is virtually impossible to bug or tap anything.
I wonder if somebody would port gpg to my Palm computer?