Here in Boise, ID, I can get 20Mbps down via Qwest but it's a piddly 896kbps up. That's *kilo*bits per second. And it costs US$100/mo (before taxes, fees, and the CEO's boat payments).
Every time my downstream speed goes up, my upstream speed goes down. Went from a 3Mbps/1.5Mbps DSL to 8Mbps/1Mbps cable. Now it's 20Mbps and 896kbps. WTF?
My daddy IS a COBOL programmer, too! And teaches COBOL.
I took my one and only one university COBOL class from Dad (in 1988). At the start of the course, he'd hand out a HUGE photocopied page of COBOL jobs from the want ads.
"You'll never be out of a job if you learn COBOL."
I'll have to send this article to him. He'll be tickled pink to learn he's *still* right.
"Republican Web 2.0 consultant David All was effluent with praise"
From the MacOSX Dictionary: liquid waste or sewage discharged into a river or the sea : the bay was contaminated the effluent from an industrial plant.
Apologies for replying to my own comment but there's one other thing I can throw in here.
One Idaho Power engineer told me it's not the actual power lines that are the most valuable for BOP. It's the right of way. Electrical utilities have an incredible above ground, easy access, last mile network with well established, legal right-of-way. In that network, they can lay in whatever they want.
I remember one engineer talking about a little (experimental) robot that wound fiber along the existing power lines. Fiber doesn't interfere with the existing lines and wasn't effected by the huge RFI.
I am not an expert but from what I've learned working with folks in the US electrical utilities, broadband over powerlines is extremely difficult due to the poor quality of power lines. They're designed to haul electricity, not data. Raw electricity is very forgiving. Analog signals (e.g., Ethernet) aren't. Very very noisy, poor lines, ancient (50+ years) hardware make high quality data transmissions unlikely.
If BOP would really work, why do we still have human meter readers? Why doesn't the meter transmit its usage back over the same lines it's pulling power? Meter reading is one of the biggest costs of a utility company so they have big incentives to fix the problem. Lots of companies try to make remote monitoring hardware but don't get very far due to the poor (data) capabilities of the network.
I'm not discounting the idea completely. Just saying that, in my limited knowledge, it's fraught with practical problems and is unlikely to be a solution anytime soon.
I have a pile of machines at home. If Microsoft's Patch Tuesday puts me over my limit, who's going to pay for it? Am I even going to allow my boxes to auto-update anymore? Thus the Internet Pollution, all those unpatched boxes, will grow worse.
Are they going to count all the incoming connections from bots trying to hack my network? Like an incoming cell call, will I still have to pay for unwanted incoming connections?
If I don't like what they're doing, where the heck am I supposed to go? Back to dial-up? Oh, wait, I'll do my movie downloads at work. Just like health insurance, the burden will start to be placed on the employer. Expect office internet filtering to start to become more draconian.
The concept of competition and free markets in the US is only important until someone gets enough lobbyists. Sometimes this country really pisses me off.
Bought WordPerfect. Bought Quatro Pro. Bought UNIX. Bought Digital Research (DR DOS).
Ruined them all.
Rumor at the time was Ray Noorda was actually a shill for Microsoft. In the span of a few years Noorda/Novell managed to buy up all reasonably credible competition to MS. And ruined them all.
Learn from history, Adobe. Don't try to bag the bear in its own den. That's just stupid.
Compare to Creationism. *Cough* excuse me, "Intelligent Design".
Unexplained evidence.
God did it.
End of discussion. Or else.
If I may inject a personal note, I do believe in God. But I don't believe He created an existance so simple that anything we don't understand must have His hand directly involved.
I have a 1022n in my cube. Uses PCL and it works great with Linux.
Big fat disclaimer: I work for the company that makes the 102x series for HP but the 102x series was made before I started here. I wish the M1005 (a product I did work on) worked with Linux.
I see a mix in the future. Use interpreted languages where possible, drop into C where necessary.
I have to push around 500M raw (RGB) images. I do the preliminary work in Python then move the really slow stuff into a Python module using C. Python's distutils makes it ridiculously simple to compile module on Windows, Linux, and MacOSX.
Result? Doing something simple to that 500M image takes 20-30 seconds in Python and less than a second in C.
It's like anything else in life. Use the tool appropriate for the job. If you find yourself constantly using a butterknife as a screwdriver, maybe it's time to investigate other tools.
Find a pet project, find someone with a pet project, volunteer to help a friend or community organization set up a website. It has to be something you're interested in doing or you'll avoid it and not enjoy it. Pick a target and shoot for it, O'Reilly and Google at your side.
The only way to really learn anything is to do it. I read a bazillion books about DNS/Bind but none of it sank in until I had to set it up myself. Same with SQL, Perl, Python, Template Toolkit, C++, etc.
It's annoying, it's painful, it's frustrating, but the only way to really learn anything is to get in there and get your hands dirty.
Doesn't seem to work too well with Firefox (Linux-Intel and Mac OSX-PPC), either. I just keep getting blank screens with "loading... loading... loading..." too.
Does it still use Flash? I don't install Flash because it cuts down on the annoying blinking crap and I'm too lazy.
Until I finally shut off DNS to it, every day or so there would be some Windows Active Directory system out there trying to update my DNS servers. I'm guessing "testcluster" is a popular name for a new Windows clusters.
No matter the technology, porting to a new platform is a chunk of work. Even in C.
I work in embedded systems. I don't care how "standard" C is--it's only the source code that's standard. When we move to a new processor or the compiler upgrades, we spend weeks chasing subtle bugs out of the code. Never mind complex stuff like trying to port our stuff to a new RTOS or trying to integrate thousands+ of lines of purchased source code into our product.
Back in college, there was a guy who spent all day in the terminal cluster playing MUDs. We called him "Sleeper" because we would find him asleep in the chair every morning.
He eventually did flunk out. He was a nice guy; just picked a bad direction in life.
BTW, for all you young pups out there, a "terminal cluster" is a room full of dumb text terminals attached to a single computer, like our VAX. We only had Windows/386 AND WE LIKED IT! I'm going to go soak my teeth now...
Speaking of regrets, I could have spent all my time writing Windows 3.0/3.1/95/NT programs, and gotten rich, instead of wasting my time on UNIX. Oh, well.
Which will I believe in the future? A fluffy piece about how much eBay cares about security ("We weally weally do care about security! Trust us!") which gives me no solid information ("Our toolbar does such-and-such to protect our customer.", "We have X technologies to assist victims of fraud.")
OR
stories from my brother *in Australia* about how he was ripped off by an eBay scammer? Or stories from coworkers and friends that have been ripped off by an eBay scammer? Or the author of a national bestseller telling how he was eBay scammed? [1]
Here's a tip, eBay. Word of mouth goes a lot farther than a fluffy article that tells me nothing. I read a long time back a dissatisfied customer tells ~3x the number of people his experience than a satisfied customer.
I'm honked off because I had to sit through that article, feeling patronized and advertised. Sheesh. What a waste.
[1] _The Paradox Of Choice: Why More Is Less_ by Barry Schwartz ISBN:0060005696 (I think it was the first few paragraphs of chapter 7.)
I wrote several college papers in GeoWrite and GeoDraw on a screaming 486 with (gasp!) 16M of RAM! Everyone else was using WordPerfect 5.1 under Win3.1.
GeoDraw's "nudge" buttons allowed me to push an object by one pixel (up, down, left right), something I have longed for in every single graphics package I've used since then. Their Tetris is still the nicest I've ever played. For a few years after, I'd still have Geos installed on a 486 just to play Tetris. I bet I still have my 3.5" install disks somewhere.
AFAIK, they never came out with an SDK, though. They can't really complain Microsoft killed them if I couldn't even write any apps for it!
I remember seeing this sort of thing way back in the DOS days. Battery backed RAM on an ISA card. Product died out because RAM was more expensive than HD.
I haven't used their briefcase but back when I was working at a tiny startup, I'd tarball, compress, and encrypt all my source code and mail it to my yahoo account. Perfect offsite backup.
I also mail shareware registration keys and the entire software installer to myself. Having the registration keys online has saved my butt more than once. Plus, whenever I set up a new machine, I can get the exact version I'm used to.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah! says the iguana.
http://www.pvponline.com/2006/05/16/may-16-2006/
Pshaw. You and your antiquated 5.25" 360k disks are so behind the times.
I have it on three 3.5" 720k disks.
Windows 1.01 forever!
I actually bought it. Was the last version of Windows I paid for until Win2000.
Can I come live with you?
Here in Boise, ID, I can get 20Mbps down via Qwest but it's a piddly 896kbps up. That's *kilo*bits per second. And it costs US$100/mo (before taxes, fees, and the CEO's boat payments).
Every time my downstream speed goes up, my upstream speed goes down. Went from a 3Mbps/1.5Mbps DSL to 8Mbps/1Mbps cable. Now it's 20Mbps and 896kbps. WTF?
My daddy IS a COBOL programmer, too! And teaches COBOL.
I took my one and only one university COBOL class from Dad (in 1988). At the start of the course, he'd hand out a HUGE photocopied page of COBOL jobs from the want ads.
"You'll never be out of a job if you learn COBOL."
I'll have to send this article to him. He'll be tickled pink to learn he's *still* right.
"The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten-thousand truths." - Aleksandr Pushkin (Russian Poet)
Uh, effluent?
"Republican Web 2.0 consultant David All was effluent with praise"
From the MacOSX Dictionary:
liquid waste or sewage discharged into a river or the sea : the bay was contaminated the effluent from an industrial plant.
See also:
http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A+effluent
Oh, wait. Politician talking about a propaganda plan. I guess effluent is the correct word then. Carry on.
Apologies for replying to my own comment but there's one other thing I can throw in here.
One Idaho Power engineer told me it's not the actual power lines that are the most valuable for BOP. It's the right of way. Electrical utilities have an incredible above ground, easy access, last mile network with well established, legal right-of-way. In that network, they can lay in whatever they want.
I remember one engineer talking about a little (experimental) robot that wound fiber along the existing power lines. Fiber doesn't interfere with the existing lines and wasn't effected by the huge RFI.
I am not an expert but from what I've learned working with folks in the US electrical utilities, broadband over powerlines is extremely difficult due to the poor quality of power lines. They're designed to haul electricity, not data. Raw electricity is very forgiving. Analog signals (e.g., Ethernet) aren't. Very very noisy, poor lines, ancient (50+ years) hardware make high quality data transmissions unlikely.
If BOP would really work, why do we still have human meter readers? Why doesn't the meter transmit its usage back over the same lines it's pulling power? Meter reading is one of the biggest costs of a utility company so they have big incentives to fix the problem. Lots of companies try to make remote monitoring hardware but don't get very far due to the poor (data) capabilities of the network.
I'm not discounting the idea completely. Just saying that, in my limited knowledge, it's fraught with practical problems and is unlikely to be a solution anytime soon.
I have a pile of machines at home. If Microsoft's Patch Tuesday puts me over my limit, who's going to pay for it? Am I even going to allow my boxes to auto-update anymore? Thus the Internet Pollution, all those unpatched boxes, will grow worse.
Are they going to count all the incoming connections from bots trying to hack my network? Like an incoming cell call, will I still have to pay for unwanted incoming connections?
If I don't like what they're doing, where the heck am I supposed to go? Back to dial-up? Oh, wait, I'll do my movie downloads at work. Just like health insurance, the burden will start to be placed on the employer. Expect office internet filtering to start to become more draconian.
The concept of competition and free markets in the US is only important until someone gets enough lobbyists. Sometimes this country really pisses me off.
Anyone remember Novell's office suite?
Bought WordPerfect.
Bought Quatro Pro.
Bought UNIX.
Bought Digital Research (DR DOS).
Ruined them all.
Rumor at the time was Ray Noorda was actually a shill for Microsoft. In the span of a few years Noorda/Novell managed to buy up all reasonably credible competition to MS. And ruined them all.
Learn from history, Adobe. Don't try to bag the bear in its own den. That's just stupid.
And it's terrible.
0 2/05/139207
"Inside Symbian: the Platform Nokia Secretly Hates"
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/
I used to work for a company (Extended Systems, now iAnywhere) that developed on Symbian. It's a horrible development platform from what I was told.
if privacy isn't important, why do homes have curtains?
Compare to Creationism. *Cough* excuse me, "Intelligent Design".
If I may inject a personal note, I do believe in God. But I don't believe He created an existance so simple that anything we don't understand must have His hand directly involved.
I have a 1022n in my cube. Uses PCL and it works great with Linux.
Big fat disclaimer: I work for the company that makes the 102x series for HP but the 102x series was made before I started here. I wish the M1005 (a product I did work on) worked with Linux.
Amen.
I see a mix in the future. Use interpreted languages where possible, drop into C where necessary.
I have to push around 500M raw (RGB) images. I do the preliminary work in Python then move the really slow stuff into a Python module using C. Python's distutils makes it ridiculously simple to compile module on Windows, Linux, and MacOSX.
Result? Doing something simple to that 500M image takes 20-30 seconds in Python and less than a second in C.
It's like anything else in life. Use the tool appropriate for the job. If you find yourself constantly using a butterknife as a screwdriver, maybe it's time to investigate other tools.
Don't just read about stuff. Do stuff.
Find a pet project, find someone with a pet project, volunteer to help a friend or community organization set up a website. It has to be something you're interested in doing or you'll avoid it and not enjoy it. Pick a target and shoot for it, O'Reilly and Google at your side.
The only way to really learn anything is to do it. I read a bazillion books about DNS/Bind but none of it sank in until I had to set it up myself. Same with SQL, Perl, Python, Template Toolkit, C++, etc.
It's annoying, it's painful, it's frustrating, but the only way to really learn anything is to get in there and get your hands dirty.
Doesn't seem to work too well with Firefox (Linux-Intel and Mac OSX-PPC), either. I just keep getting blank screens with "loading... loading... loading..." too.
Does it still use Flash? I don't install Flash because it cuts down on the annoying blinking crap and I'm too lazy.
I own the testcluster.com domain.
l uster.com
Until I finally shut off DNS to it, every day or so there would be some Windows Active Directory system out there trying to update my DNS servers. I'm guessing "testcluster" is a popular name for a new Windows clusters.
For example:
query: _ldap._tcp.pdc._msdcs.testcluster.com
query: _kerberos._tcp.dc._msdcs.testcluster.com
query: 6c91d860-bf0b-4bd9-b0f3-2a368934fe0e._msdcs.testc
query: _ldap._tcp.DomainDnsZones.testcluster.com
No matter the technology, porting to a new platform is a chunk of work. Even in C.
I work in embedded systems. I don't care how "standard" C is--it's only the source code that's standard. When we move to a new processor or the compiler upgrades, we spend weeks chasing subtle bugs out of the code. Never mind complex stuff like trying to port our stuff to a new RTOS or trying to integrate thousands+ of lines of purchased source code into our product.
Back in college, there was a guy who spent all day in the terminal cluster playing MUDs. We called him "Sleeper" because we would find him asleep in the chair every morning.
He eventually did flunk out. He was a nice guy; just picked a bad direction in life.
BTW, for all you young pups out there, a "terminal cluster" is a room full of dumb text terminals attached to a single computer, like our VAX. We only had Windows/386 AND WE LIKED IT! I'm going to go soak my teeth now...
Speaking of regrets, I could have spent all my time writing Windows 3.0/3.1/95/NT programs, and gotten rich, instead of wasting my time on UNIX. Oh, well.
Which will I believe in the future? A fluffy piece about how much eBay cares about security ("We weally weally do care about security! Trust us!") which gives me no solid information ("Our toolbar does such-and-such to protect our customer.", "We have X technologies to assist victims of fraud.")
OR
stories from my brother *in Australia* about how he was ripped off by an eBay scammer? Or stories from coworkers and friends that have been ripped off by an eBay scammer? Or the author of a national bestseller telling how he was eBay scammed? [1]
Here's a tip, eBay. Word of mouth goes a lot farther than a fluffy article that tells me nothing. I read a long time back a dissatisfied customer tells ~3x the number of people his experience than a satisfied customer.
I'm honked off because I had to sit through that article, feeling patronized and advertised. Sheesh. What a waste.
[1] _The Paradox Of Choice: Why More Is Less_
by Barry Schwartz ISBN:0060005696
(I think it was the first few paragraphs of chapter 7.)
I wrote several college papers in GeoWrite and GeoDraw on a screaming 486 with (gasp!) 16M of RAM! Everyone else was using WordPerfect 5.1 under Win3.1.
GeoDraw's "nudge" buttons allowed me to push an object by one pixel (up, down, left right), something I have longed for in every single graphics package I've used since then. Their Tetris is still the nicest I've ever played. For a few years after, I'd still have Geos installed on a 486 just to play Tetris. I bet I still have my 3.5" install disks somewhere.
AFAIK, they never came out with an SDK, though. They can't really complain Microsoft killed them if I couldn't even write any apps for it!
I remember seeing this sort of thing way back in the DOS days. Battery backed RAM on an ISA card. Product died out because RAM was more expensive than HD.
I haven't used their briefcase but back when I was working at a tiny startup, I'd tarball, compress, and encrypt all my source code and mail it to my yahoo account. Perfect offsite backup.
I also mail shareware registration keys and the entire software installer to myself. Having the registration keys online has saved my butt more than once. Plus, whenever I set up a new machine, I can get the exact version I'm used to.