I hadn't really thought seriously about voluteering before reading this, but it appears that public schools are desperate enough to submit to the demands of greedy profiteers. Its got to stop, and it appears the only way to stop it is to offer alternatives.
If you want it to stop don't offer your time as a volunteer, but get out there and stump for school board and rally for increased funding to schools.
Volunteers, while well meaning and frequently useful, are absolutely not the answer. The state has committed to provide public education but it frequently does so poorly and local communities begrudge every penny. Because of what are generally inadequate and inequitable funding for school districts and wide-spread voter opposition to school budgets (and the resulting taxes), volunteers are just patching a leak. You can volunteer all of your time and still not solve the basic problem. It has nothing to do with computers and everything to do with paying for public schools.
And they invested in GetMusic.com and
Artistsdirect.com (see article here) and have involvements with Sony and AOL. I don't have the link to the spinoff.
Lousy theory, there. BMG is involved in other online music sales schemes including their own spin-off that predates the Napster-hysteria.Odds are good that BMG is trying to cover all the bases, eventually positioning itself where it has direct influence on all the internet music distributors. If one of these takes off or creates enough mindshare that it eclipses the others, BMG can use it's position to force a consolidation. I have on good authority (a former coworker) that much of BMG "gets it" in regards to the internet and MP3, they just don't know how they are going to turn a profit.
Other than the bald marketing plug not being appropriate for Slashdot IMNSHO, this represents a seachange for QNX.
As a student I tried to get a copy of QNX via snail mail which went pretty much like this:
Letter #1- Can I get an educational copy?
Reply #1- No, but we'll send you a fat book on the architecture and how to develop with it.
Letter #2 - Okay, how about a student discount?
Reply #2 - No, but you can buy our "reasonably priced" entry-level edition.
Phone Call -
Can I at least eval it before I drop the few $k?
No, only professional developers working for established companies can get evals.
Okay, thanks.
I was underwhelmed and didn't touch their product until years later when a friend let me play with his copy.
It looks like they're getting a clue, but they aren't there yet.
- technik
I was an early adopter of the LS120, buying mine from Ingram Micro the day they were made available to vendors (circa December 1996/January 1997). Drivers were poor (still had the debugging & symbols in them) and troublesome (real-mode) and unavailable for anything but Win/DOS. It was slow but capacious but the disks cost too much and there was no one to exchange data with because the drives had not caught on. Further, you could not boot from them because the BIOSes did not recognize the IDE Floppy yet. Finally, it died a few days before the 1 year warranty expired and the maker claimed that the warranty applied from the manufacture date not the end-user sales date.
A lone bad experience, so what? Well I learned a lesson: Don't buy any consumer technology until it has been in the market for at least a year and you can see how it pans out.
In addition to delivering the "better mousetrap" and building critical mass in the market any new storage device is going to have to overcome experiences like mine and still flourish. I'm not buying anything until I see it out there and gaining popularity.
You are lucky Larry Ellison, few novices experience so much Tae Kwan Leep so soon.
:)
Re:And lo, the mechanic speaks.
on
Air-Powered Cars
·
· Score: 1
Not to burst your bubble, but why saddle the thing with pistons and all those moving parts and the associated friction? A better idea (maybe in use already?) would be to use the compressed air to spin a small turbine that drives a flywheel. The flywheel could then be used to drive a generator and the electricity would power the vehicle. That way you maximize the energy in the compressed air... you spin the flywheel at a constant speed except at startup. The wheel motors would also be the brakes scavenging some wasted power during stopping by acting as generators.
Any engineers around to throw some numbers on this? Am I way off-base?
You know what's really cool? That someone actually credited Memepool for a link. Check back through the quickies and you'll notice that entire chunks of Memepool turn up.
It's an uncommon courtesy for folks to attribute their links.
It's not sad, it's expected. Developers of various stripes (FSF, Open Source, public domain, et.al.) who contribute to the free Unixes have created a collection of platforms that are low cost/free, stable, relatively easy to develop for, and available on commodity hardware. Given this, the next wave to wash ashore is certain to be the strictly commercial applications, many of whom have suffered difficulty and setback on that other OS. Surprised? Don't be. It's as if we built a public highway using private donations along side the original dirt path, everyone is going to use it if they can and their uses may not be the same as those of the original supporters.
- technik
DNSSEC isn't going to be the be-all, end-all for DNS. In addition to any issues with the implementation, we have the issues of any public key infrastructure. Do I trust you? Can I verify you? Should I? Layer on top of this BIND's exemplary record for security and I see nothing but problems.
- technik
Chalk this one up as another abuse of the patent system. I can't imagine why the patent office didn't throw this one out... the reviewer must never have owned an electronic device or even an etch-a-sketch. The application of a clear plastic film as a protective covering is so obvious that it has been used on watch faces, eraseable boards, glass sheets, bulk plexiglass, automotive parts, etc. etc. and these certainly predate 1992.
Does the "innovation" of using it on a LCD make it patentable? I think we have our answer.
What this needs is someone with deep pockets to sue this into the ground.
whatever.
It's amazing that these lawsuits are even brought. MAPS is an opt-in system. It's entirely voluntary. I understand that one can bring suit for any (or no) reason but where do these companies get the idea that they can dictate how other companies and individuals use their own personal resources? If I, as a SA, decide not to accept email from a given source and I inform my customers of this then it's fine. If the customers decide to use my services knowing this, it's fine. My suspicion is that the customers don't understand or are not informed of these administrative decisions and it's upon this that the lawsuits are going to focus.
Tech's notes on avoiding the run around with commercial vendors:
* Document everything. Every configuration from the Prom to the OS to the details of your custom application must be in hardcopy.
* Don't call anyone until you have every relevant piece of information you can imagine (and there will be some that you can't imagine).
* Keep daily tabs on the products you use- Subscribe to the newsgroups, announce lists, etc., check one of the Usenet searches like deja weekly, join a users group.
* Train at least two people in your organization on each product and make them responsible for it. Get backing for a policy that no closed-source, proprietary, or commercial product can be used unless there is in-house knowledge.
* Call the sales reps and pre-sales engineers monthly and ask them about patches, notices, updates, etc.
* Never buy a product that only runs on one platform or with one back-end. Best-of-breed also means best chance of survival, so don't get locked in.
* Fight against using proprietary or non-standard anything when possible. Stay as flexible as possible but don't think for a second that open-source will save you from a knowledge deficit.
* Always have more than one product of a given type under testing.
* Negotiate with multiple vendors but try not to let on with which ones you are in contact.
* Get a support contract from the vendor and from a third party. Use the third-party to hassle with the vendor for you.
* When selecting a product try to get a written statement that the product works as described and what the vendor's responsibilities are. Run everything past your legal people.
Sun, whatever else they are, is a _hardware_ company. Too many forget that their bread-and-butter is equipment. Solaris and the rest of their stable of software is there to sell hardware since many, if not most, of their corporate customers want to buy the OS bundled with the hardware.
On a side note, recall that Microsoft has a patent on the scrollbar, and IBM has a patent on pressing a "more" button - while M$ may be an "evil" company, you don't see them threatening gnome (yet). Most likely CNET will hold this patent defensively, since, judging by the USPTO's recent actions, if CNET wasn't awarded with it, someone else likely would be - and it's a good thing that's not doubleclick. No, these companies will follow the Unisys example and start suing over patents when they get feeble and see the market escaping from them. Or maybe just wait until there is sufficient provocation or penetration to make it worth while.
Without seeing the details of the patent, it strikes me as a Bad Thing. After seeing the details of the patent, I'm certain it is a Bad Thing... they've essentially claimed to have patented the loathesome issuance of cookies and the tracking of users. Wow.
That was not even highly original in 1996.
Feh.
Re:...lack of community, lack of continuity
on
The Leased Life?
·
· Score: 2
I see great continuity in this, it is one of the great trends of modern society: how the individual defines him/her-self through non-traditional relationships. IIRC, Sociologists refer to the traditional relationships of kinship, locale, re ligion and duty as 'geselleschaft' and the new ones, defined by employment and socialization, as 'gemeinschaft'.
It's not capitalism per se, it's the effect of capitalism and other social and intellectual trends. Monetary systems, the belief in reason and rationality, nationhood, the widespread acceptance of science and scientific method, the concept of fundamental human rights, written law and stable legal system, industrialization, widespread literacy, transportation, corporatism, communication and others contributed to it.
Without being pendantic (if I haven't been already), the trend toward leasing an d licensing rather than ownership is another expression of the larger (idealized) trend: You, as the individual, are free to take your physical and mental capital anywhere you choose, apply it as you choose, succeed or fail more or less on your own terms, and can consciously choose how you define yourself and what ties bind you to communities of your choosing.
Corporations are responding to this and, once they've found the revenue stream, are doing what they can to maintain it. However, we, collectively, are choosing these things or they would go away. The Corporations can only take what we give them and what they may steal while we aren't looking.
Everything comes down to the questions "Do you know what your systems are doing?" and "Does anyone else know but you?"
I've had the misfortune working as a field technician with support teams for large collections of technically non-uniform, geographically separate, politically disorganized entities. The people at the helpdesk can't assist any but the most minor problems because they a) don't know the software or it's configuration for each site, b) don't know the users and their jobs, c) don't know who does know these things, and d) aren't paid enough to care.
One large metropolitan financial concern had some forty staffers attached to desks and twenty contract personnel in the field to fix things that the outsourced helpdesk could not fix over the phone. This amounted to just about everything. Only two or three of the in-house staff knew enough about all the systems to keep things working. Most of the contractors were tied to a specific building or department and didn't know how things worked in the field. Doubling the numbers would not help since that would just mean twice the number of people who didn't know.
Another organization has everything in house. More bodies but same problem. The people who know the systems are not the ones who maintain them. No one qualified to fix problems works helpdesk so everything gets bumped up. Calls stay open for days or weeks.
A third organization has everything in house but uses the helpdesk as little more than a switchboard. Some helpdesk staffers can help with the basics or reset passwords and create accounts but that's about it. Everything gets passed to the admins. The admins are highly trained and make a tight team but are ineffective because of the ratio of users to admins and the diversity of systems which cross and interconnect three (and sometimes more!) companies. Again, it's knowledge sharing. Due to the complexity, there are often legacy or just plain wierd systems that only one person knows. Documentation is poor to non-existant.
> I got out of college with a bachelor's in political > science from MIT, and nobody was offering me > a $125k job.
Pardon the rant, but perhaps your skillset is not worth the money. More likely, you don't have any experience.
I have bachelor's and master's degrees in the Humanities from public institutions, a state Education Department certificate, and have been furiously tinkering with circuits and computers since gradeschool. I also have six years of real world, post-college experience, the last four in the Financial sector, ranging from programming to system administration to network design to project management.
Guess what? I didn't make $125k/year my first year. Or my second or third or fourth. Why should I? Every employer I've had has looked at my background and taken a gamble: With no degree in CSci or EE can this guy do what he claims?
Just being bright isn't enough. You also have to prove you can do it.
Just nitpicking, but BIND isn't the only game in town: TinyDNS by D.J. Bernstein, the author of qmail, is much better if you take the time to figure it out.
It is complemented by DNSCache, for (obviously) caching, and others tools.
All have small footprints, are highly efficient, and were designed to be secure.
The bottom line on Cable Companies is this: they are still the same "content-providers" they were when all they offered was TV. This is their mindset- you pay a little, we give you some entertainment interspersed with commercials; you pay more, we give you better quality entertainment without the commercials; you pay even more, we give you current movies/events are scheduled intervals; you pay through the nose and we might be able to give you entertainment on demand. This is their business model and it's proven to work.
They don't get this "internet thing". They don't understand home-based web publishing. They don't want to know about home-based *nix servers. They want you to pay for the services _they_ provide. It's not about you.
The cable companies are providing you with cheap, fast, shared access- and probably doing so at a loss- because they want all of your other entertainment dollars. End of story.
It's going to be the phone companies (ILECs, CLECs, etc.) who fill the niche for SOHO and power-users. Why? Because their tried and true business model is based upon providing service, not content. They bring in a line, they charge you for the time. Pretty simple and they're not interested in who you call or what you do.
And, just to piss everyone off, we're going to see a lot more metered usage-based charges for service. It's inevitable. There will be three tiers of service: home- flat-rate unmetered but probably restricted, only limited by the number of people they can get signed on, will be bandwidth starved during peak hours; small office- which will allocate minimum bandwidth guarantees but will cost a higher flat rate and/or have per/mb metered usage fees for high volume use; business- negotiated minimum/maximum, service fees/service guarantees, metered usage fees. Get used to it.
I'm looking forward to the event (and it will be an _EVENT_ ) where Sybase looks at their market share and decides that there should be a Unix version of PowerBuilder.
Mine can't be the only workplace where everyone bitches about Windows but only two or three of the dozens of developers actually develop in a Unix environment. Most of this is because "the tools aren't there" or the "users won't like it" or "we've got too much invested in this product".
Think of it... Jbuilder, Delphi, PowerBuilder, something like Visual C++ all on Unix. All leveraging the investments in skill, time, and code. Sounds pretty good.
I'm rambling but... liquid cooling is common on CMOS processors and works very well. Unless there is a remarkable change in power consumption the MHz race is going to force the engineers to it. Kryotech, as everyone probably knows, makes a system for the AMD Athlon and reports are good. I expect to see more of these. Aside, I had a colleague who kept a neat array of retired Amdahl processors and their heatsinks on their desk. Neat little designs.
Slashdot Mirror
I hadn't really thought seriously about voluteering before reading this, but it appears that public schools are desperate enough to submit to the demands of greedy profiteers. Its got to stop, and it appears the only way to stop it is to offer alternatives.
If you want it to stop don't offer your time as a volunteer, but get out there and stump for school board and rally for increased funding to schools.
Volunteers, while well meaning and frequently useful, are absolutely not the answer. The state has committed to provide public education but it frequently does so poorly and local communities begrudge every penny. Because of what are generally inadequate and inequitable funding for school districts and wide-spread voter opposition to school budgets (and the resulting taxes), volunteers are just patching a leak. You can volunteer all of your time and still not solve the basic problem. It has nothing to do with computers and everything to do with paying for public schools.
- technik
How about BMG's own news:
Invests in eritmo.com
Launches their own digital download site
Album Direct
Associating with LiquidAudio
In 1998 focusing on internet sales
And they invested in GetMusic.com and Artistsdirect.com (see article here) and have involvements with Sony and AOL. I don't have the link to the spinoff.
-technik
Lousy theory, there. BMG is involved in other online music sales schemes including their own spin-off that predates the Napster-hysteria.Odds are good that BMG is trying to cover all the bases, eventually positioning itself where it has direct influence on all the internet music distributors. If one of these takes off or creates enough mindshare that it eclipses the others, BMG can use it's position to force a consolidation. I have on good authority (a former coworker) that much of BMG "gets it" in regards to the internet and MP3, they just don't know how they are going to turn a profit.
+$.02
- technik
Other than the bald marketing plug not being appropriate for Slashdot IMNSHO, this represents a seachange for QNX.
As a student I tried to get a copy of QNX via snail mail which went pretty much like this:
Letter #1- Can I get an educational copy?
Reply #1- No, but we'll send you a fat book on the architecture and how to develop with it.
Letter #2 - Okay, how about a student discount?
Reply #2 - No, but you can buy our "reasonably priced" entry-level edition.
Phone Call - Can I at least eval it before I drop the few $k?
No, only professional developers working for established companies can get evals.
Okay, thanks.
I was underwhelmed and didn't touch their product until years later when a friend let me play with his copy.
It looks like they're getting a clue, but they aren't there yet.
- technik
I was an early adopter of the LS120, buying mine from Ingram Micro the day they were made available to vendors (circa December 1996/January 1997). Drivers were poor (still had the debugging & symbols in them) and troublesome (real-mode) and unavailable for anything but Win/DOS. It was slow but capacious but the disks cost too much and there was no one to exchange data with because the drives had not caught on. Further, you could not boot from them because the BIOSes did not recognize the IDE Floppy yet. Finally, it died a few days before the 1 year warranty expired and the maker claimed that the warranty applied from the manufacture date not the end-user sales date.
A lone bad experience, so what? Well I learned a lesson: Don't buy any consumer technology until it has been in the market for at least a year and you can see how it pans out.
In addition to delivering the "better mousetrap" and building critical mass in the market any new storage device is going to have to overcome experiences like mine and still flourish. I'm not buying anything until I see it out there and gaining popularity.
+$.02
*BOOT*
You are lucky Larry Ellison, few novices experience so much Tae Kwan Leep so soon.
:)
Not to burst your bubble, but why saddle the thing with pistons and all those moving parts and the associated friction? A better idea (maybe in use already?) would be to use the compressed air to spin a small turbine that drives a flywheel. The flywheel could then be used to drive a generator and the electricity would power the vehicle. That way you maximize the energy in the compressed air... you spin the flywheel at a constant speed except at startup. The wheel motors would also be the brakes scavenging some wasted power during stopping by acting as generators.
Any engineers around to throw some numbers on this? Am I way off-base?
- technik
You know what's really cool? That someone actually credited Memepool for a link. Check back through the quickies and you'll notice that entire chunks of Memepool turn up.
It's an uncommon courtesy for folks to attribute their links.
- technik
(not affilliated with memepool)
It's not sad, it's expected. Developers of various stripes (FSF, Open Source, public domain, et.al.) who contribute to the free Unixes have created a collection of platforms that are low cost/free, stable, relatively easy to develop for, and available on commodity hardware. Given this, the next wave to wash ashore is certain to be the strictly commercial applications, many of whom have suffered difficulty and setback on that other OS. Surprised? Don't be. It's as if we built a public highway using private donations along side the original dirt path, everyone is going to use it if they can and their uses may not be the same as those of the original supporters.
- technik
DNSSEC isn't going to be the be-all, end-all for DNS. In addition to any issues with the implementation, we have the issues of any public key infrastructure. Do I trust you? Can I verify you? Should I? Layer on top of this BIND's exemplary record for security and I see nothing but problems. - technik
Read it here
Chalk this one up as another abuse of the patent system. I can't imagine why the patent office didn't throw this one out... the reviewer must never have owned an electronic device or even an etch-a-sketch. The application of a clear plastic film as a protective covering is so obvious that it has been used on watch faces, eraseable boards, glass sheets, bulk plexiglass, automotive parts, etc. etc. and these certainly predate 1992.
Does the "innovation" of using it on a LCD make it patentable? I think we have our answer.
What this needs is someone with deep pockets to sue this into the ground.
whatever.
This post is buzzword compliant.
P2P, e*, B2B, B2C, i*, ad. nauseum
- technik
It's amazing that these lawsuits are even brought. MAPS is an opt-in system. It's entirely voluntary. I understand that one can bring suit for any (or no) reason but where do these companies get the idea that they can dictate how other companies and individuals use their own personal resources? If I, as a SA, decide not to accept email from a given source and I inform my customers of this then it's fine. If the customers decide to use my services knowing this, it's fine. My suspicion is that the customers don't understand or are not informed of these administrative decisions and it's upon this that the lawsuits are going to focus.
+.02$
- technik
I can't help but jump in on this...
Tech's notes on avoiding the run around with commercial vendors:
* Document everything. Every configuration from the Prom to the OS to
the details of your custom application must be in hardcopy.
* Don't call anyone until you have every relevant piece of information
you can imagine (and there will be some that you can't imagine).
* Keep daily tabs on the products you use- Subscribe to the newsgroups,
announce lists, etc., check one of the Usenet searches like deja weekly,
join a users group.
* Train at least two people in your organization on each product
and make them responsible for it. Get backing for a policy that no
closed-source, proprietary, or commercial product can be used unless
there is in-house knowledge.
* Call the sales reps and pre-sales engineers monthly and ask them about
patches, notices, updates, etc.
* Never buy a product that only runs on one platform or with one
back-end. Best-of-breed also means best chance of survival, so don't get
locked in.
* Fight against using proprietary or non-standard anything when
possible. Stay as flexible as possible but don't think for a second that
open-source will save you from a knowledge deficit.
* Always have more than one product of a given type under testing.
* Negotiate with multiple vendors but try not to let on with which ones
you are in contact.
* Get a support contract from the vendor and from a third party. Use the
third-party to hassle with the vendor for you.
* When selecting a product try to get a written statement that the
product works as described and what the vendor's responsibilities are.
Run everything past your legal people.
Sun, whatever else they are, is a _hardware_ company. Too many forget that their bread-and-butter is equipment. Solaris and the rest of their stable of software is there to sell hardware since many, if not most, of their corporate customers want to buy the OS bundled with the hardware.
- technik
Regarding volume management... it's nearly there, it just hasn't been announced. Veritas Volume Manager is about to be released for Linux.
I think I just violated the NDA. Oh, I didn't sign anything. Damn, that felt good!
- technik
On a side note, recall that Microsoft has a patent on the scrollbar, and IBM has a patent on pressing a "more" button - while M$ may be an "evil" company, you don't see them threatening gnome (yet). Most likely CNET will hold this patent defensively, since, judging by the USPTO's recent actions, if CNET wasn't awarded with it, someone else likely would be - and it's a good thing that's not doubleclick. No, these companies will follow the Unisys example and start suing over patents when they get feeble and see the market escaping from them. Or maybe just wait until there is sufficient provocation or penetration to make it worth while.
Without seeing the details of the patent, it strikes me as a Bad Thing. After seeing the details of the patent, I'm certain it is a Bad Thing... they've essentially claimed to have patented the loathesome issuance of cookies and the tracking of users. Wow.
That was not even highly original in 1996.
Feh.
I see great continuity in this, it is one of the great trends of modern society: how the individual defines him/her-self through non-traditional relationships. IIRC, Sociologists refer to the traditional relationships of kinship, locale, re
ligion and duty as 'geselleschaft' and the new ones, defined by employment and socialization, as 'gemeinschaft'.
It's not capitalism per se, it's the effect of capitalism and other social and intellectual trends. Monetary systems, the belief in reason and rationality, nationhood, the widespread acceptance of science and scientific method, the concept of fundamental human rights, written law and stable legal system, industrialization, widespread literacy, transportation, corporatism, communication and others contributed to it.
Without being pendantic (if I haven't been already), the trend toward leasing an d licensing rather than ownership is another expression of the larger (idealized) trend: You, as the individual, are free to take your physical and mental capital anywhere you choose, apply it as you choose, succeed or fail more or less on your own terms, and can consciously choose how you define yourself and what ties bind you to communities of your choosing.
Corporations are responding to this and, once they've found the revenue stream, are doing what they can to maintain it. However, we, collectively, are choosing these things or they would go away. The Corporations can only take what we give them and what they may steal while we aren't looking.
...anyway enough ranting.
-technik
Everything comes down to the questions "Do you know what your systems are doing?" and "Does anyone else know but you?"
I've had the misfortune working as a field technician with support teams for large collections of technically non-uniform, geographically separate, politically disorganized entities. The people at the helpdesk can't assist any but the most minor problems because they a) don't know the software or it's configuration for each site, b) don't know the users and their jobs, c) don't know who does know these things, and d) aren't paid enough to care.
One large metropolitan financial concern had some forty staffers attached to desks and twenty contract personnel in the field to fix things that the outsourced helpdesk could not fix over the phone. This amounted to just about everything. Only two or three of the in-house staff knew enough about all the systems to keep things working. Most of the contractors were tied to a specific building or department and didn't know how things worked in the field. Doubling the numbers would not help since that would just mean twice the number of people who didn't know.
Another organization has everything in house. More bodies but same problem. The people who know the systems are not the ones who maintain them. No one qualified to fix problems works helpdesk so everything gets bumped up. Calls stay open for days or weeks.
A third organization has everything in house but uses the helpdesk as little more than a switchboard. Some helpdesk staffers can help with the basics or reset passwords and create accounts but that's about it. Everything gets passed to the admins. The admins are highly trained and make a tight team but are ineffective because of the ratio of users to admins and the diversity of systems which cross and interconnect three (and sometimes more!) companies. Again, it's knowledge sharing. Due to the complexity, there are often legacy or just plain wierd systems that only one person knows. Documentation is poor to non-existant.
I'd like to hear a success story.
- Technik
> I got out of college with a bachelor's in political
> science from MIT, and nobody was offering me
> a $125k job.
Pardon the rant, but perhaps your skillset is not worth the money.
More likely, you don't have any experience.
I have bachelor's and master's degrees in the Humanities from public institutions, a state Education Department certificate, and have been furiously tinkering with circuits and computers since gradeschool.
I also have six years of real world, post-college experience, the last four in the Financial sector, ranging from programming to system administration to network design to project management.
Guess what? I didn't make $125k/year my first year. Or my second or third or fourth. Why should I? Every employer I've had has looked at my background and taken a gamble: With no degree in CSci or EE can this guy do what he claims?
Just being bright isn't enough.
You also have to prove you can do it.
Before typing amazon dot com try isbn.nu.
No, I'm not affiliated with them in any way. I just appreciate their service to the bibliophile community.
- technik
Just nitpicking, but BIND isn't the only game in town: TinyDNS by D.J. Bernstein, the author of qmail, is much better if you take the time to figure it out.
It is complemented by DNSCache, for (obviously) caching, and others tools.
All have small footprints, are highly efficient, and were designed to be secure.
- Technik
The bottom line on Cable Companies is this: they are still the same "content-providers" they were when all they offered was TV. This is their mindset- you pay a little, we give you some entertainment interspersed with commercials; you pay more, we give you better quality entertainment without the commercials; you pay even more, we give you current movies/events are scheduled intervals; you pay through the nose and we might be able to give you entertainment on demand. This is their business model and it's proven to work.
They don't get this "internet thing". They don't understand home-based web publishing. They don't want to know about home-based *nix servers. They want you to pay for the services _they_ provide. It's not about you.
The cable companies are providing you with cheap, fast, shared access- and probably doing so at a loss- because they want all of your other entertainment dollars. End of story.
It's going to be the phone companies (ILECs, CLECs, etc.) who fill the niche for SOHO and power-users. Why? Because their tried and true business model is based upon providing service, not content. They bring in a line, they charge you for the time. Pretty simple and they're not interested in who you call or what you do.
And, just to piss everyone off, we're going to see a lot more metered usage-based charges for service. It's inevitable. There will be three tiers of service: home- flat-rate unmetered but probably restricted, only limited by the number of people they can get signed on, will be bandwidth starved during peak hours; small office- which will allocate minimum bandwidth guarantees but will cost a higher flat rate and/or have per/mb metered usage fees for high volume use; business- negotiated minimum/maximum, service fees/service guarantees, metered usage fees. Get used to it.
I'm looking forward to the event (and it will be an _EVENT_ ) where Sybase looks at their market share and decides that there should be a Unix version of PowerBuilder.
Mine can't be the only workplace where everyone bitches about Windows but only two or three of the dozens of developers actually develop in a Unix environment. Most of this is because "the tools aren't there" or the "users won't like it" or "we've got too much invested in this product".
Think of it... Jbuilder, Delphi, PowerBuilder, something like Visual C++ all on Unix. All leveraging the investments in skill, time, and code. Sounds pretty good.
I'm rambling but... liquid cooling is common on CMOS processors and works very well. Unless there is a remarkable change in power consumption the MHz race is going to force the engineers to it. Kryotech, as everyone probably knows, makes a system for the AMD Athlon and reports are good. I expect to see more of these. Aside, I had a colleague who kept a neat array of retired Amdahl processors and their heatsinks on their desk. Neat little designs.