Back before Windows had terminal server, and before products like Citrix got popular, we *nixers proudly declared the advantages of a network-transparent display system. The world has moved on: Windows has it; plus a host of add-ons that make the whole thing seamless, efficient and fast.
Meanwhile I find it is faster to use VNC over a slow link than raw X protocol... what's with that? VNC is just sending raw graphics updates, you'd think X would be much faster since it could send drawing commands.
In reality, although the X networking was originally designed to allow sending of drawing primitives over the wire, most toolkits work these days by rendering everything at the client end and sending it as bitmaps of one kind or another to the X server. This is largely because of the lack of standardisation and old-fashioned extension methods X makes available.
Sooner or later it will be time to chuck the bathwater out. The baby long since grew into something else.
Re:Throw your Microsoft boxes into Boston Harbor!
on
The Demise of IP?
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· Score: 1
Spot on. It's a balancing act: if there is no opportunity to make money out of inventiveness then it is not justifiable spending anything other than leisure time on it (this goes for companies or individuals these days... everyone needs to make a living). Our whole economic system is based on this concept.
OTOH, human progress ever since the invention of the spoken word has been down to people sharing and building on each others ideas. Make it too hard to share ideas and our progress will crawl to a stop.
Seems to me, this was the concept of a Java applet as well: write a mini-application that can be launched from a web browser, giving all the advantages of distributed client server type processing without the headache of application installation on every machine. Of course a well written java application would make use of threading to fetch data in the background as well.
What are the pros and cons of each approach?
Java is already compiled (albeit into something that has to be interpreted or JIT compiled) and should run faster
Java requires a JRE to be started: this eats memory and takes time. OTOH Javascript is usually built in to the browser, but it does have to parse the script as it goes.
Java has an enourmous base API, plus you can find millions of libraries for various functions. I hazard a guess that is not as true for JS (but I am no expert).
Am I wrong - is AJAX something really new? Or is it just substituting Javascript for Java, and manipulating the DOM rather than constructing your interface with Swing components? (Both AJAX & Java can use XML as a data interchange format).
Good thing other countries don't think like you then. Every country in the world has their government dependant on technology provided by foreign corporations - Microsoft, Sun, SAP, Oracle, HP, IBM etc etc etc... The US would be one of the few countries in the world where it would even be feasible to restrtict government agencies to using products of home grown corps.
Down here in Australia, I think we'd be lucky of 5% of the technology our society relies on comes from Aussie companies.
It is not welcome. Linux is about Open Source, and allowing people to link-in binary closed drivers goes against this.
If that were the case, why is there an exemption to the GPL for the specific case of loading a binary modules? If such an exemption were not granted, then distributing a binary module, which loads by dynamically linking it against the kernel, would mean that module itself must be GPL.
Where have you been? It has been the policy of the Linux kernel for a long time that it would never stablize a binary driver interface, in order to prevent people from not making their drivers open source.
I am pretty sure that is not the main reason for this policy (of course it probably depends on exactly who you talk to though).
As pointed out elsewhere by other posters, there are multiple issues :
Making a stable API makes it easier to distribute closed source modules (this could be a bad or a good thing, depending on where you stand on that issue)
Making a stable API benefits any driver writers and maintainers, open or closed source, because they do not need to keep updating and retesting their drivers for each and every kernel release
The most important of all IMHO making a stable API benefits users enormously because they do not have to recompile (and maybe even hand patch) drivers from outside the kernel tree when they upgrade a kernel version (a task well and truly beyond 99.9% of computer users, I assure you). Even for old hacks it is a royal pain in the behind, something that really makes you think twice about upgrading at all if you have any oddball hardware on your machine.
Hmmmm. "Sony Ericsson" != "Sony"
Sony Ericsson is a joint venture company between Sony and Ericsson. Which means just because Sony chooses to use Zeiss lenses on their cameras, that may not translate to S-E using the same supplier.
More likely self-management in terms of employment regulations -- IIRC, if you're a contractor then your employer is not allowed to define the hours of when you work or don't work; they can only define milestones for your progress and set times for meetings they need you to attend.
You're employer is allowed to stipulate whatever they like in the contract. You should read the proposed contract quite carefully before signing it. Usually you will be signing a standard contract from an agency that specifies that you will work the standard core hours of the client, unless agreed otherwise with your manager.
Actually I'd be more worried about what's happened since he was released. He's probably on multiple watchlists. Every time he books an airline ticket alarm bells will be ringing in many agencies around the world. If he stepped off a plane in the US (or any one of a number of other paranoid countries) he would probably be detained and refused entry.
Meanwhile, his phone is probably tapped, his emails and snailmail intercepted... need I go on?
...and the fact that India is 10-12 hours ahead of a US time zones. This is one reason for the efficiency - providing 24 hour customer service to Americans is easy if for 12 of those hours, your customer reps are actually just doing a regular 9-to-6 in their own country.
1. Are you using some kind of time compression technology...? 9am - 6pm = 9 hours, I think you will find.
2. If you are trying to provide 24 hour coverage it doesn't matter which timezone you are in. 9am-6pm is 9 hours of the 24 hours anywhere at all (unless of course you really do have some kind of time compression machine.....)
Actually the original process (odd revisions for dev, even for stable) sounds more like the "normal" process to me. I work for a telecoms vendor and that's not dissimilar to the process used - at some point you make a stable release. You fork off a new branch for the next release and the old branch goes into maintenance mode. Occasionally, due to customer pressures, you backport some feature or another to the old release, but mostly only bugfixes go in there.
There are some pretty big differences too: most commercial developers start a new branch by specifying what features are supposed to be in by release time. After that, change control is applied - typically features get removed but rarely more put in. The Linux approach was that more and more features were added until some seemingly random point where Linus said "enough is enough" and a new stable branch was released.
Also, commercial software developers often have a number of releases being developed in parallel. The complexity of mapping corrections forward and back often leads to big problems...
1. An unknown startup will have a very hard time competing directly with a behemoth.
2. They would not be able to compete for the same reason as IBM would not be able to compete if it did not offshore... unless the workers are willing/able to work for a wage that gives the company a similar cost-base in the US as in India or wherever else the cheapest high quality labour source is.
The economy is a pie. The richer among us have a large share of the pie. When the economy grows, the pie gets bigger. Their piece of pie grows, yes -- but so does everyone else's.
So in other words, the ratio of the wealth of the richest people to the poorest people remains a constant. Strange, that does not seem to be what is happening...
If you are at the bottom end of the earning ladder, you might just about make enough money to survive. There is nothing left over to buy shares after you have paid your rent, groceries, etc.
If you are in the middle end (lets say like an IT professional) then you will have a bit left over after paying your living costs. You might have enough left over to invest in a few shares, especially if you curtail spending on life's little luxuries. The dividends and capital appreciation you will earn will eventually build up, towards the end of your life, into something that will either make your retirement pleasant, or if you hoard it, give your children a better chance at building up wealth
If you are really rich (worth say 10s of millions or more) then it is ludicrously easy to build wealth. You don't even need to work, and even if you spend money at what seems to us middle earners an obscene rate, you will still have plenty left over to re-invest, continuing the cycle.
Meanwhile, many that were on the middle rung of this ladder are getting their salaries squeezed by the action of the system, as companies scramble to move their operations to the cheapest possible labour market. This benefits the very wealthy by increasing dividends but moves some from the middle of the ladder down to the bottom where they will not be able to invest in anything at all.
Innovation, entrepreneurship, and low tax overhead will help. We also have to face up to the fact that there are industrious and hard working people out there who will do our job on the cheap. We in the West need to wake up, start thinking more innovatively, and compete with our best tools: our creativity, education, and tremendous freedom to explore new business opportunities.
You make the common mistake of assuming that only westernised workers have "creativity, education, and tremendous freedom to explore new business opportunities". India has a good education system and people everywhere are capable of being creative. As for freedom to explore new business opportunities, there is probably more freedom to do this in countries which have little legislation to protect workers rights.
In fact, it is a simple matter of supply and demand. The consequences of offshoring to India in the medium term will be:
Demand for tech workers will increase in India and decrease in US / Europe etc
Wages in India go up, as the demand for skilled workers eventually exceeds supply (it is already happening in some skill sets)
Wages in US, Europe, etc go down - as far as they are allowed to by local economic conditions. They can't go too far because it is just too expensive to live there.
The exchange rate of the Indian currency vs. $US, EUR, etc will change to reflect the direction of currency flow into India
A new equilibrium point will be reached.
The same thing already happened in Manufacturing industries, some years back. At the time the rhetoric was all about about doing things smarter / cheaper / faster, about moving up the value chain (designing things rather than building them). But now, thanks to efficient telecommunications, even the uppermost rungs of the ladder are able to be shifted from country to country easily.
The solution... either get yourself into a job that cannot physically be moved (think services that need physical presence.. waiting on tables, fixing peoples cars, etc) or accept the reality that you no longer owe allegiance to any particular nation, and move with the work. A highly competent tech worker could probably get a really good job in India right now; you would not get paid much in $US but you would be able to afford a good lifestyle in India I imagine.
This data is a sample from visitors to w3schools.com (whom I had never heard of before reading this post). It is hardly a representative, statistically valid sample.
It would be much more useful to get a sample from a widely visited site. I suspect that individual home users, who can easily update, do so quickly but corporates, who want to squeeze max value from each costly company-wide upgrade, wait as long as possible before upgrading.
Interesting... SonyEricsson was formed as a joint venture between Sony and Ericsson. Sony was supposed to bring expertise in design of consumer electronics and Ericsson the radio engineering expertise. It seemed like a good idea, because earlier Ericsson phones had a reputation for solid radio performance but zero usability (to say nothing of being one of the ugliest on the market).
Looks like SonyEricsson still has a long way to go.. How do we like the sound of SonyEricssonApple? Or maybe AppleEricssonSony?
or 5. You take a metro train/bus/tram to your destination. If you have a well designed public transport system then you shouldn't have to walk too far.
I'm an Aussie who has lived some years in Europe, and I've come to the conclusion that the take up or otherwise of public transport is largely culture driven.
Here in Australia the rail system is virtually non-existant - high or low speed. But I can see a lot of commonality with the situation in the US.
Population density in Aus is far lower than the US, let alone Europe or Japan. Our population is mainly centered in one large city in each state, with the closest of these being ~900km apart. This makes air travel the only option these days.
But on top of that we have ended up with a very US-style culture when it comes to many things - and car ownership as an expression of individuality is one of them. Even within the big cities, most people drive everywhere (even when that results in being stuck in a huge traffic jam). Building more tollways seems to be the government response to this. Meanwhile much of the public transport infrastructure has been privatised - and we all know private enterprise does not like to spend money without a guaranteed return.
Every so often, a dreamy eyed train lover will propose a high speed rail link along the most trafficed route in the country (Sydney-Canberra-Melbourne) but it never gets off the ground.
Here's why: What's the most important thing on your desktop? It's the data. If someone gets access to your libraries or whatever, who cares?
The most valuable thing on my computer is probably the user name and password to my internet banking facility.. Not that I store them on the machine but I do type them in. Maybe running as non-root does give you access to all the data in a users home dir but it sure makes it more difficult to overwrite those libraries he's talking about with keylogging trojans that will harvest my passwords.
Interesting. Most westernized nations started out with government owned Telcos and have spent the last 20 years selling them off and inviting in multinationals to compete with them.
Usually, the consumers in said nations had nothing positive at all to say about the government owned telcos (the comments were just like the ones here.. too costly, poor service, etc). Privatisation and Competition were pursued ostensibly to fix some of these things..
In the US, on the other hand, you started off with privately owned telecoms companies pretty much from day one. Now you've got local government instrumentalities installing telecommunications networks and everyone here is saying "yee ha! Now I can ditch my subscription to that slugworthy telco and get much better / free service straight from my tax $".
I don't know who is right. But I think the old maxim of you get what you paid probably applies..
It might be pretty cool in terms of Wifi.. but compared to 3G it's pretty lame.
With WCDMA 3G, the network tells the UE (user equipment == phone, laptop, PDA, whatever) which are the surrounding cells it must look for. Not only that, but when the UE starts getting a good signal from another cell, the network will add a new radio link from that cell so that the UE can have links to more than one cell at a time. The handover is completely seamless. It's called soft handover.
By the way, strictly speaking roaming means the ability to use your device in a network other than your home one. The ability to sustain a connection when moving from the coverage area of one base station / AP to another is called 'handover'.
Cell operators like Verizon spend BILLIONS on proprietary "3G" networks.
Actually, they aren't proprietary. They are according to 3GPP Standards (www.3gpp.org).
And anyway, who do you think will be deploying these Wimax networks? My guess is large telecoms corporations.. the very same ones you claim will be destroyed by this.
This thread is typical of the IT support mindset that says "if only we can restrict what the users are doing we will have a much easier ride". The problem is that assumes that a one size fits all PC configuration can really work for all users.
It probably won't cause a problem if nobody in the company can install screen savers, desktop images, custom sounds, their favourite media player, or games. What does cause a problem is when your engineers cannot install the software they need to do their work.
I work in a large multinational manufacturer of telecoms equipment. I routinely have to install software: drivers for various types of mobile phones, different JVM versions to be compatible with vaious applications we have to test, test tools, etc. If I ring my helpdesk and ask them to install them, they say "sorry, this is not an SOE approved application". Luckily I was able to put the case to be given Admin rights.
I would also add that this type of user usually has the requisite skills to fix most problems anyway - so doesn't need to call the help desk as much anyway. One of my colleagues recently picked up a virus that the SOE antivirus did not pick up. He located the fix for it on the net and applied it himself.
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Amen to that.
Back before Windows had terminal server, and before products like Citrix got popular, we *nixers proudly declared the advantages of a network-transparent display system. The world has moved on: Windows has it; plus a host of add-ons that make the whole thing seamless, efficient and fast.
Meanwhile I find it is faster to use VNC over a slow link than raw X protocol... what's with that? VNC is just sending raw graphics updates, you'd think X would be much faster since it could send drawing commands.
In reality, although the X networking was originally designed to allow sending of drawing primitives over the wire, most toolkits work these days by rendering everything at the client end and sending it as bitmaps of one kind or another to the X server. This is largely because of the lack of standardisation and old-fashioned extension methods X makes available.
Sooner or later it will be time to chuck the bathwater out. The baby long since grew into something else.
Spot on. It's a balancing act: if there is no opportunity to make money out of inventiveness then it is not justifiable spending anything other than leisure time on it (this goes for companies or individuals these days... everyone needs to make a living). Our whole economic system is based on this concept.
OTOH, human progress ever since the invention of the spoken word has been down to people sharing and building on each others ideas. Make it too hard to share ideas and our progress will crawl to a stop.
Seems to me, this was the concept of a Java applet as well: write a mini-application that can be launched from a web browser, giving all the advantages of distributed client server type processing without the headache of application installation on every machine. Of course a well written java application would make use of threading to fetch data in the background as well.
What are the pros and cons of each approach?
Am I wrong - is AJAX something really new? Or is it just substituting Javascript for Java, and manipulating the DOM rather than constructing your interface with Swing components? (Both AJAX & Java can use XML as a data interchange format).
Good thing other countries don't think like you then. Every country in the world has their government dependant on technology provided by foreign corporations - Microsoft, Sun, SAP, Oracle, HP, IBM etc etc etc... The US would be one of the few countries in the world where it would even be feasible to restrtict government agencies to using products of home grown corps.
Down here in Australia, I think we'd be lucky of 5% of the technology our society relies on comes from Aussie companies.
If that were the case, why is there an exemption to the GPL for the specific case of loading a binary modules? If such an exemption were not granted, then distributing a binary module, which loads by dynamically linking it against the kernel, would mean that module itself must be GPL.
Where have you been? It has been the policy of the Linux kernel for a long time that it would never stablize a binary driver interface, in order to prevent people from not making their drivers open source.
I am pretty sure that is not the main reason for this policy (of course it probably depends on exactly who you talk to though).
As pointed out elsewhere by other posters, there are multiple issues :
Hmmmm. "Sony Ericsson" != "Sony" Sony Ericsson is a joint venture company between Sony and Ericsson. Which means just because Sony chooses to use Zeiss lenses on their cameras, that may not translate to S-E using the same supplier.
You're employer is allowed to stipulate whatever they like in the contract. You should read the proposed contract quite carefully before signing it. Usually you will be signing a standard contract from an agency that specifies that you will work the standard core hours of the client, unless agreed otherwise with your manager.
Actually I'd be more worried about what's happened since he was released. He's probably on multiple watchlists. Every time he books an airline ticket alarm bells will be ringing in many agencies around the world. If he stepped off a plane in the US (or any one of a number of other paranoid countries) he would probably be detained and refused entry.
Meanwhile, his phone is probably tapped, his emails and snailmail intercepted... need I go on?
Perhaps they mean tiny when compared to the not so tiny state of West Australia (2,529,875 sq. km - nearly a third of the size of the US).
1. Are you using some kind of time compression technology...? 9am - 6pm = 9 hours, I think you will find.
2. If you are trying to provide 24 hour coverage it doesn't matter which timezone you are in. 9am-6pm is 9 hours of the 24 hours anywhere at all (unless of course you really do have some kind of time compression machine.....)
Actually the original process (odd revisions for dev, even for stable) sounds more like the "normal" process to me. I work for a telecoms vendor and that's not dissimilar to the process used - at some point you make a stable release. You fork off a new branch for the next release and the old branch goes into maintenance mode. Occasionally, due to customer pressures, you backport some feature or another to the old release, but mostly only bugfixes go in there.
There are some pretty big differences too: most commercial developers start a new branch by specifying what features are supposed to be in by release time. After that, change control is applied - typically features get removed but rarely more put in. The Linux approach was that more and more features were added until some seemingly random point where Linus said "enough is enough" and a new stable branch was released.
Also, commercial software developers often have a number of releases being developed in parallel. The complexity of mapping corrections forward and back often leads to big problems...
You are missing something. 2 things in fact.
1. An unknown startup will have a very hard time competing directly with a behemoth.
2. They would not be able to compete for the same reason as IBM would not be able to compete if it did not offshore... unless the workers are willing/able to work for a wage that gives the company a similar cost-base in the US as in India or wherever else the cheapest high quality labour source is.
So in other words, the ratio of the wealth of the richest people to the poorest people remains a constant. Strange, that does not seem to be what is happening...
If you are at the bottom end of the earning ladder, you might just about make enough money to survive. There is nothing left over to buy shares after you have paid your rent, groceries, etc.
If you are in the middle end (lets say like an IT professional) then you will have a bit left over after paying your living costs. You might have enough left over to invest in a few shares, especially if you curtail spending on life's little luxuries. The dividends and capital appreciation you will earn will eventually build up, towards the end of your life, into something that will either make your retirement pleasant, or if you hoard it, give your children a better chance at building up wealth
If you are really rich (worth say 10s of millions or more) then it is ludicrously easy to build wealth. You don't even need to work, and even if you spend money at what seems to us middle earners an obscene rate, you will still have plenty left over to re-invest, continuing the cycle.
Meanwhile, many that were on the middle rung of this ladder are getting their salaries squeezed by the action of the system, as companies scramble to move their operations to the cheapest possible labour market. This benefits the very wealthy by increasing dividends but moves some from the middle of the ladder down to the bottom where they will not be able to invest in anything at all.
You make the common mistake of assuming that only westernised workers have "creativity, education, and tremendous freedom to explore new business opportunities". India has a good education system and people everywhere are capable of being creative. As for freedom to explore new business opportunities, there is probably more freedom to do this in countries which have little legislation to protect workers rights.
In fact, it is a simple matter of supply and demand. The consequences of offshoring to India in the medium term will be:
The same thing already happened in Manufacturing industries, some years back. At the time the rhetoric was all about about doing things smarter / cheaper / faster, about moving up the value chain (designing things rather than building them). But now, thanks to efficient telecommunications, even the uppermost rungs of the ladder are able to be shifted from country to country easily.
The solution... either get yourself into a job that cannot physically be moved (think services that need physical presence.. waiting on tables, fixing peoples cars, etc) or accept the reality that you no longer owe allegiance to any particular nation, and move with the work. A highly competent tech worker could probably get a really good job in India right now; you would not get paid much in $US but you would be able to afford a good lifestyle in India I imagine.
This data is a sample from visitors to w3schools.com (whom I had never heard of before reading this post). It is hardly a representative, statistically valid sample.
It would be much more useful to get a sample from a widely visited site. I suspect that individual home users, who can easily update, do so quickly but corporates, who want to squeeze max value from each costly company-wide upgrade, wait as long as possible before upgrading.
Interesting... SonyEricsson was formed as a joint venture between Sony and Ericsson. Sony was supposed to bring expertise in design of consumer electronics and Ericsson the radio engineering expertise. It seemed like a good idea, because earlier Ericsson phones had a reputation for solid radio performance but zero usability (to say nothing of being one of the ugliest on the market).
Looks like SonyEricsson still has a long way to go.. How do we like the sound of SonyEricssonApple? Or maybe AppleEricssonSony?
or 5. You take a metro train/bus/tram to your destination. If you have a well designed public transport system then you shouldn't have to walk too far.
I'm an Aussie who has lived some years in Europe, and I've come to the conclusion that the take up or otherwise of public transport is largely culture driven.
Here in Australia the rail system is virtually non-existant - high or low speed. But I can see a lot of commonality with the situation in the US.
Population density in Aus is far lower than the US, let alone Europe or Japan. Our population is mainly centered in one large city in each state, with the closest of these being ~900km apart. This makes air travel the only option these days.
But on top of that we have ended up with a very US-style culture when it comes to many things - and car ownership as an expression of individuality is one of them. Even within the big cities, most people drive everywhere (even when that results in being stuck in a huge traffic jam). Building more tollways seems to be the government response to this. Meanwhile much of the public transport infrastructure has been privatised - and we all know private enterprise does not like to spend money without a guaranteed return.
Every so often, a dreamy eyed train lover will propose a high speed rail link along the most trafficed route in the country (Sydney-Canberra-Melbourne) but it never gets off the ground.
The most valuable thing on my computer is probably the user name and password to my internet banking facility.. Not that I store them on the machine but I do type them in. Maybe running as non-root does give you access to all the data in a users home dir but it sure makes it more difficult to overwrite those libraries he's talking about with keylogging trojans that will harvest my passwords.
Interesting. Most westernized nations started out with government owned Telcos and have spent the last 20 years selling them off and inviting in multinationals to compete with them.
Usually, the consumers in said nations had nothing positive at all to say about the government owned telcos (the comments were just like the ones here.. too costly, poor service, etc). Privatisation and Competition were pursued ostensibly to fix some of these things..
In the US, on the other hand, you started off with privately owned telecoms companies pretty much from day one. Now you've got local government instrumentalities installing telecommunications networks and everyone here is saying "yee ha! Now I can ditch my subscription to that slugworthy telco and get much better / free service straight from my tax $".
I don't know who is right. But I think the old maxim of you get what you paid probably applies..
It might be pretty cool in terms of Wifi.. but compared to 3G it's pretty lame.
With WCDMA 3G, the network tells the UE (user equipment == phone, laptop, PDA, whatever) which are the surrounding cells it must look for. Not only that, but when the UE starts getting a good signal from another cell, the network will add a new radio link from that cell so that the UE can have links to more than one cell at a time. The handover is completely seamless. It's called soft handover.
By the way, strictly speaking roaming means the ability to use your device in a network other than your home one. The ability to sustain a connection when moving from the coverage area of one base station / AP to another is called 'handover'.
Actually, they aren't proprietary. They are according to 3GPP Standards (www.3gpp.org).
And anyway, who do you think will be deploying these Wimax networks? My guess is large telecoms corporations.. the very same ones you claim will be destroyed by this.
This thread is typical of the IT support mindset that says "if only we can restrict what the users are doing we will have a much easier ride". The problem is that assumes that a one size fits all PC configuration can really work for all users.
It probably won't cause a problem if nobody in the company can install screen savers, desktop images, custom sounds, their favourite media player, or games. What does cause a problem is when your engineers cannot install the software they need to do their work.
I work in a large multinational manufacturer of telecoms equipment. I routinely have to install software: drivers for various types of mobile phones, different JVM versions to be compatible with vaious applications we have to test, test tools, etc. If I ring my helpdesk and ask them to install them, they say "sorry, this is not an SOE approved application". Luckily I was able to put the case to be given Admin rights.
I would also add that this type of user usually has the requisite skills to fix most problems anyway - so doesn't need to call the help desk as much anyway. One of my colleagues recently picked up a virus that the SOE antivirus did not pick up. He located the fix for it on the net and applied it himself.