ZBS and American/Canadian Radio drama company also resells the LotR CDs in the US. So you can watch it anytime you want and at $70 for 13 CDs is a pretty decent deal.
http://216.122.251.79/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Scre en =PROD&Store_Code=ZF&Product_Code=LORD&Category_Cod e=KFCD
They also have the Hobbit and their orignal productions of Jack Flanders and Ruby the Galatic Gumshoe.
It seems that smaller communities need to do this as a utility. Comercial companies won't take the time to install the infrastructure since they percieve the risk too high. They don't want to take the time to do the research to determine if it could be profitable.
At the same time it is cost prohibitive to enter the broadband market as a small company, so we don't see small companies offering broadband (not just in small towns but anywhere). This makes it very unlikly that you will get much competition for small communities and it will be years before a large company decides to take the risk.
The other issue is the infrastructure and right of way issues can be a hassle to deal with and are more easily done by a goverment.
So small communities have both unknown market risk, and a scale that doesn't encourage compition so it seems like this makes sense.
So I would definitly say in a small community lobby for municpal Internet and use linking all the goverment buildings together as the basis of the network ring.
Of course if you get too small then your municpality won't have much advatage of scale.
At Linux World SUN was demoing Nautilus in their booth running on Solaris, with a bonobo aware copy of Star Office.
Honestly this is 0.1 release it is still pretty early. And the core team works only on Linux.
If there are any people out there who are interested in ports, please DO! Join the nautilus mailing list and come by #nautilus on irc.gnome.org. We will very happily take your patches.
With any kind of roll out of this size you are going to do massive customization. What defines which distribution you wish to use is which one is easiest to customize. I have found Debian the easiest to customize to my needs. In most large environments, people don't upgrade machines, they wipe them out and migrate their server data. Debian gives you the choice of upgrading machines.
The real power of debian, is that you can customize one users machine and those customizations will continue across upgrades. Not everyone needs dia, but some subset of people do and they have dia and when the upgrade they still have dia and you don't have to do anything. That is powerfull and usefull. Yes you have to login to someones machine and give them dia the first time.
If you use debian you need dzinstall and you will need to customize the base install.
Another important strategy that has not been discussed is how do you break this down to groups.
Identify groups of dependent people. The accounting department is all dependent on everyone else there so they should be made a unit. Give them their own server. I would aim for 1 server for every 20-100 users. Those users should be able to function with their server even if the "centralized" servers go down.
each "departmental" server should be backed up, should have a "network drive", a "name server", an "account server", a "network server", "OS Server", "print server"
NFS server
NIS slave
DHCP server
DNS server
Web server (Intranet)
LPD
should server as an apt server or as an rpm server
The machine configuration for the department should also live on your central server and should be pushed out to each department using rsync. But by distributing the neccesary services you reduce this risk of a catastrophic failure hitting all users.
NIS/NFS
NIS/NFS security I know it is impossible but they are very convienient and there are some precaustions you can take.
NFS - users do not have root on NFS clients. IF they do they can be any user on the system.
you keep a static arp table for IP address and you use static DHCP for clients. And you list every client that is allowed to connect to your NFS server. Yes this can still be hacked!!!! but someone cannot just bring in a laptop and full control over your users files. Its keeps accidents from happening.
NIS
enforce use of good passwds. this is done by configuring the passwd program.
Make sure you have slave NIS servers!!!! Set the local slave to be the default NIS server for clients.
Don't use broadcast NIS, set the NIS server on each client. Yes someone can still spoof your NIS server, do not let the NIS from the outside internet in. It is worth it to trust your users, becuase it makes your computing environment better and you can trace down who caused problems and get them fired.
Automated Installs.
2500 user machines assume 50 departmental server and 5 back end master servers.
Buy new equipment and do the master servers correctly.
Replication Strategy.
Make sure you can produce a departmental server from a blank box in 2 hours. Make sure anyone who can read instructions can produce a departmental server in 2 hours. And hopefully that won't be two hours of interactive time.
Given a departmental server, make sure you can build a new desktop from a blank machine in one hour. If cannot you have problems with your automation and your network fix!
USE SOURCE CONTROL all system infromation should be in source control! From the very beginning keep your management scripts, your NIS source files, your deployment descripters in Source control, I reccomend CVS! This will make your life easier.
DESKTOP
as for a desktop, I like windowmaker, I think it is very obvious for beginning users.
WP is substantially lighter than Star Office, and is fairly feature complete. Star office will be a pig, try it out, some users will require it as it is the most feature complete office swuite available on linux. (NOTE DO NOT INSTALL star office so it is user writable, even if there is just one user per machine install it as a net install "setup/net" otherwise it lets users corrupt it) Applixware is clean, fast, stable has strange user interface, and doesn't have the feature count that many people want. And what you see on the screen and what you see on the printer tend to be pretty far off.
I would reccomend avoiding net storage for applications and even all user data. Hard drives are cheap. It makes users less reliant on the network for performance issues. It also makes users for more in control at their workstation and it allows you to customize a workstation to an individuals tastes. (this is why debian is great, you get both customizations and easy upgrades). From a computing efficiency standard this does not make sense the net-slave computers are better. From an employee productivity standard this makes lots of sense.
When setting this up script everything, make sure the that someone other than the person who solved the problem tries it and can do it.
This is a lot of work and requires formalizing a lot of things. I would reccomend start trying to build the departmental server. The build the things to build the departmental server, destroy it and verify that it can be automaticall built by someone else, using information stored in source control. After that then start doing the end user workstations.
Good LUCK! if you found any of these thoughts usefull do email me.
One of the big changes has been that productivity has become limited by people. Agrarian societies were limited by natural resources, no matter how many people or how much monentary capital you had you could not boost productivity. Here you were born to a job and you kept it for life.
The Industrial age changed that dramtically, new technology allowed us to extract new ammount of resources through specialization. What was expensive was capital and orginization. Human being were really cheap.
To press that point, durning the industrial revolution we had people that would use small children and women in coal mines, that everyone knew was leathal and did kill them off at young ages. In the US we had "Company Towns" where you earned your wages, rented your house, bought your food, all from the same source. In England you had the department stores that didn't pay you enough to live in London so they put you up in company dormatory and controlled what time you could come home and took over 12 hours of your day. And if you lost your job, you and your family were likely to starve. People used to line up for jobs, there were surplusses of people, because people were cheap.
In the digital era, our limitiing factor for growth is human beings. Capital is cheap, natural resources are nearly irrelevent, but human beings are tough to get. Yes lots of us do work 12 hour days, but if we get fed up with it we have a job in less than two weeks. We get daily emails, telephone call, cold calls asking us to switch our job. We go the Movies and bombarded by advertisments asking us to go work for some company (at least at the Metreo in SF).
Losing good employee's can destroy a company. Old military style managers are not just innefective they are a detriment to your company. As individuals we don't requires an extensive pension system, because we have a job market that won't stop. We can move anywhere in the United States and find work without a problem.
Union have become mostly irrelevent becuase the demand is so high that and individual has bargening power with the employer.
From an employment and labor point of view life has changed. I still think that the digital revolution really started in 1995. Yes the technology is much older, but it wasn't untill 1994-1995 that the internet finally became big. Also I believe it is no coincidence that this when productivity started rising in the US. Personal computers had been arround for 15 years and there was no improvment in worker productivity! Computers produced a competitive advantage because they allowed companies to respond faster but until 1995 the return on captital was no better than not having computers.
With that said, we are only five years into the digital communications revolution, give it some time to produce your major social changes! Steam powered looms didn't change the world overnight!
I think a "visual" programming language is a wast of time. Mostly it is usefull for writing reports.
Basic on the Apple and Comodorre 64 were great!
You didn't need to compile! That was pretty nice, just write and run. It was pretty easy to do basic line graphics, there were readily available text games (like Emon games on Apple II) that were easy to modify as a way to learn the programming.
Logo is decent as well. (it is NOT just the turtle). Pascall has was a nice formal language, on the Mac it was easy to integrate with GUI stuff.
I still think Perl should NEVER be a first language for anyone.
I have been wondering about python, with some of gui toolkits as a first language, but there is no decent collections of python childrens programs...
One very scary thing about tech companies in general is that the Stock Options that they give employee's as compensation to make them stick don't count as costs for accounting purposes. But the Options do really count as money, they dilute share holder value, in other words Options really are costs. To quote the Economist "For instance, Microsoft, the world's most valuable company, declared a profit of $4.5 billion in 1998; when the cost of options awarded that year, plus the change in the value of outstanding options, is deducted, the firm made a loss of $18 billion, according to Smithers." from 7-Aug-99, sorry a login is required to read old issues.
This is not just a problem with Microsoft but with tech companies in general, I think that this accountancy rules does confuse investors to the profitablity of companies and makes tech companies which have a high percentage of incentive options appear much better on paper than they actually are.
Yes cross platform C++ development is not there and few people are trying to make it work. I consider this a problem.
CORBA is neat. It is very cool and fun for writing distributed NETWORK applications. CORBA at this point is only well supported for C++. Several people do have C bindings, but all that I have played with are weak compared to the C++. If I wasn't distributing my processing across a network I might think again about why I need CORBA.
Perl is nice, for any application of any size be prepared to write your own interface. Consider tcl, doesn't do that much, but it embedds itself really nicely and doesn't have any licencing issues to worry about.
Java, is cross platform ready, has some CORBA support, but I believe you have to be careful what orbs you use or write your own interface.
I have worked on several projects that did UNIX/NT work. Both were with companies with a fair ammount of money.
The second project stuck with C, used plain old Socket Communication. Went with writing an object layer in house (simple but did the job) then writing a tool to create the.h and.c files out of the simple object language (simply impliment objects as structures, or multi-dimensional arrays) and just use a C compiler to get your binaries. This doesn't give you any performance hits compared to C++, and it makes your underlying application code very portable. Abstract out your database interfaces and don't wory about them untill you work with a new version. Build your own communication server that all applications register there messages with and recieve messages from (old style of programming, but it works) and use Inet Sockets. The end result is you can get applications that are n nodes clusterable and the platforms don't matter. The GUI a poor choice was done in this regard they went with Neuron Data (Now Blaze Soft, Formerly Elements, formerly OIT) which really is as slow as tcl/TK at run time without the portability. They now have a Java product that I haven't tried. Right now either TK or Java make the most sense for GUI's to me.
Having seen what happens when you go vendor bound, building code interfaces in house with extensability and portability in mind gives you the greatest flexability in the future.
so that is my thoughts about how to tackle cross platfrom distributed appliations.
The accusations of communism really are not justified, even hard core free software people like RMS are NOT communists.
The article describes sharing software so we are not slaves to one another.
It is the SCIENTIFIC METHOD. The "Free Software" "OSS" movement comes directly from the modern scientific method of peer review.
How can I say I have the best software for the job if someone can't look at how I made it and propose better solutions? Most of us don't want the destruction of software companies and free market economies, we just want the BEST software that could possibly exist. There is no other way. Wether you are cathedral modeled like the FSF or bazzare modeled like the linux project, you still just want the best software the world has to offer.
There is a loose tie here between Computer Science and Computer Engineering. In most scientific inquests we expose our results and methodology so other people and try it and verify wether we were correct or not. Anyone who does not release their methodology is not believed.
In an engineering task, like writing software, we are not trying to find truth, but we are trying to find the best way to do things. We want it effecient (works on small resources), feauture complete (does all the things we would like it to), and robust (doesn't stop working just because the wrong thing happend). We cannot verify that we have the best peice of software if we can't look at the code and propose a better solution!
Sure there is an ego trip of being the person who is always finding the best solution, or of showing off your code and having other people use it because it is the best.
But most importantly we just want the best software! Peer review leeds to the best software.
If you want a feature or a bug fix enough, you will learn how to do it, or find someone to do it.
Most computers are more than powerfull enough to flood a T1. I am sure the of has plenty of horespower.
As for security. Most of the apple web servers use Apples fairly old ACL per directory for file shareing. The Permission are secure and have stood up to time. As far as connecting to the files system from remote if you use another Mac it does indeed encrypt the passwd.
The Mac has very limited functionality for networking built in on MacOS, this makes it more secure. Apple fixed the TCP/IP large packet bug back in 1995. The current IP stack is fairly fast and based on the System V steam type TCP/IP stack.
Most of the Apple web site security issues have been from Filemaker integration. Filemaker is a GUI DB for MacOS (it has issues).
One of the other advantages to not having any cosole based applications, no concept of standard in and standard out, is if you do run an application on the Mac it doesn't do anything usefull. Also MacOS doesn't have any sensible kind of IPC or RPC support so even if you can compromise a single application it is extremly difficult to get to the operating system or another application.
If you did use Perl, your perl scripts need to be safe. But again on a Mac, there is no plain text file that you could grab security information.
Open BSD could be made equally secure, but it would take lots of customization and intelligence about it, the Mac is VERY high security for default configuration. Though flexibility is an issue with Macs.
As far as I understand, Bob Young has stuck by a couple of key principals.
Red Hat does not sell Software. Linux is a loss leader for a deflating market.
First and foremost Red Hat does not sell Software, they give it away for free. I downloaded 6.0 of their website just fine. Didn't pay them a dime. They were happy to have me install it at my work even though they didn't know I had it.
Red Hat Sells Marketing and packaging. Just a company in Seattle we know, but Red Hat doesn't make any pretentions. People by label and brandname, and in return get piece of mind. If Red Hat can stick by that they will do reasonably, they will FAIL to become a monopoly, and they have a chance to make money. People will buy Branding, remember designer Blue Jeans in the 1980's? People payed lots of cash for manufactured images.
#2
Redhat wants to deflate the computer OS market, they want to take a (can't find the numbers from the Sizing the Linux Market article that Bob Young wrote right now) large market and reduce it to 1/10 its current size (total $$ per year spent on server software) and he believes that in that Market Red Hat will take over a larger and larger share. Also it is reasonable to assume that in the Internet server market as prices drop more people will want more servers (small business under 30 people which the plurality of people are employed). Again they can make lots of profit per sale, not have very many sales per people using the product and as long as they stay lean still make a profit.
Also in a market where the services/products are being commoditized (and since they are standards they can be implemented by multiple vendors, increased compition, lower prices, lower profit margins) the biggest way you distinguish yourself is via "exteriors". The biggest exteriors are support/professional services. Will everyone buy them? NO
Most people will never buy proffessional services, but if you have a brand that establishes you as the "Expert" (Red Hat is the biggest distributer of Linux in the US, that makes them an expert), then peole will come to you. It is service where Red Hat is really taking on Microsoft! Microsoft has legendarily poor service especially for corporate support, it is Digital/Compaq who has more NT Service Proffesionals than Microsoft, It is IBM who is selling massive NT Service solutions and your handfull of the usual consultancies (PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Anderson Androids,.... ) who are actually supporting and servicing NT.
And it is those orginizations who have their hands tied. Linux offers them freedom to produce "value added IT services" It alows them to fix late and broken projects by working on the OS, and who are they going to turn to for experts? Whoever has the best branding!
From what I can see Red Hats strategy isn't pretty in the Freedom Software sense, but it is not at odds with it. Red Hat is a scary marketing company, but they are doing the right thing. Red Hat is not a tech company but a marketing company, they need some techs so they have something to help drive their marketing. I wish them the best of luck, as I would love to see a world where the best product wins, and Red Hat is helping that come true.
I see a "advertisement" for Swansa University every time I reboot my Debian Laptop (I should probably setup APM). And on my SuSE and RedHat boxes I see adds for Novell whenever they reboot. (when the IPX driver loads.) This is fine. If companies, want to sponser a word processor, and put their name on the Title Bar, the buttons and splash screens, I am not even going to bother to remove it. I apreciate them making that software possible, assuming it is Free Software (FSF Free).
Though this does have some bearing on the next version of GPL, people who pay for software are faciltators of software. They should have their names irrovocibly added to the README, something silly like "Nike Sponsored the additions of Shoe Mode to Emacs" and in X window when I run Emacs in Shoe mode I see a Nike swoosh. Now I could remove the swoosh, but I couldn't remove the reference to Nike in the README and redistribute it.
I don't know who is going to pay much money for such advertising, but they could probably do it and still get a tax deduction, like PBS, you can sponser programs you get an Add at the end of the program and you can write it off your taxes. I sounds like a nice idea.
We need to marry the suits and hackers to make the world a better place. Hackers are great at making software but are poor at hardware and enlightening the rest of the world.
Suits can HELP.
They can pay us to write "FREE" code. They can give us access to fun hardware. They can provide the SERVICES that the rest of the world needs.
Many business don't need great software they need great services, implimentation plans, defaults, promisses of emotional security and support.
Hackers do a horrible job of providing this.
Let the suits provide services for hackers software, let them add back to the community. But let them come to the hacker community on our terms. Educate and assimilate. There is nothing wrong with them trying to make some money as long as they do it appropriatly. Sometimes you have the money and not the skill, hire someone with the skill, lots of software is service, and if people want to pay to have other people configure their systems, tell them how to do it, or just talk on the phone GREAT!
Suits will bring propriatary software. Just don't let them do anything core to the Network or System. Propriatary applications are fine, they can be excellent inspiration for another "FREE" project.
The world moves because we will it. Keep hacking, keep having fun and the world will be a better place. We like to get money for toys, housing, and food (except RMS who seems to consider poverty saintly). Those people who want our skills should pay, and in our free time we can hack. Just make sure that you get the FREE time!
For a short article, it did have a surprisingly lot of important information. This is a great thing, the Econmist has a relativly small circulation, but a very high circulation among, heads of business and government.
The observation that Open Source could be and should be the Freeways of the future for digital commerce is an excellent one.
Open Source is great for Capitalism. The infra-structure needs to be public, it will be most efficient way for people to communicate. People like windows because they can share programs and files. Free software should replace that as the common ground.
Not all software will become "Free," games, and specialized software will always get someone to pay. (for games at least as long as hardware advances rapidly).
Also for as many enemies as ESR has made, he IS the leading intellectual among the hacker community, he has written better essays than any one else.
Katz is useful information for evangalists, and for distribution developers. It is interesting to be reminded of the experience of newbies, too quickly we forget.
I like to read how people become confused and muddled. Why people think Linux is traumatic. I think one thing Katz has exposed is how much garbage is out their for Linux books. I never have a Linux specific book other than a manual from a comercial distribution and by the time I had that it was too late anyway. Sometimes it seems strange that it might be difficult to install linux. I had a laptop with Win95 from work that crashed, I downloaded the install disks on my housemates macintosh, made the floppies booted my AST laptop and let it install over night via ftp, in the morning I had a functioning laptop.
Katz is also interesting in that he is a computing freedom evangalist, who has only gotten to the idea of freedom and not yet experienced it. I hope he can get through his confused, but common, methods of freeing himself from other companies ideas of how he should use information.
Not too Scary "Open DVD" is still firm leader
on
How is DivX Doing
·
· Score: 2
I really like DVD. It is a nice medium, that takes the convienience of CD and brings it to video. Unlike some peoples complaints about pixilization here, they are unfounded. Yes there are issues on high grade video, but that is not what you get from the video store. DVD fails as a media for profesional mixing but pixlated high resolution is better than grainy low resolution. The sound is nice as well.
While I am a firm LP for quality sound man. VHS has multiple failings. One VCRs use variable gain so dynamic range of sound and sound quality is not preserved. Could Analog tape be a better media? Yes. When I rent "Apocalypse Now" and view it at home will it look and sound better on DVD or VHS? Definitly DVD. Not to mention how grainy and worn out video places let their video's get.
Though I have to admit I have already rented a scratched up DVD from blockbuster.
DIVIX is a dumb idea. I think it is a niche market to make some money for a little while, then toss. (and leave the DIVIX purchasers with an overpriced piece of crap that can't get new DIVIX titles.)
People still go to the close place ot rent videos. DIVIX makes people go to circuit city and pay more to "rent" a video. And if I want to buy, I can still purchase from Blockbuster, Amazon.COM, Fry's, Best Buy.....
The common fool will eventually succumb to his pocket book.
Apple El'Capitan Case still best out there..
on
Cooler Cases
·
· Score: 2
I want one of those new apple cases for my PC! (no M$ ever, no Intel AMD & VIA)
I hate scraping my knuckles on the poorly built Aztec and Enlight cases. I want a cases that gives me easy access to my MB, while it is running. Apple G3 case is entirely usable. I like haveing a few more colors in my workspace, sure it will be tacky in 3 years but so will my computer.
Easy access, The Handles I like as they prevent it from actually resting on the floor, for those occasional spills. Being able to open while running is way cool! Sure it runs a little cooler when you run with no case, but you dust death rate goes way up....
Now Apple needs to offer the case without the logo... and with holes for ATX form factor. Then I could have a decent PC case.
Slashdot Mirror
well just go to http://www.zbs.org select Childrens Favourites, CDs and it will be listed there. The URL didn't seem to work correctly.
ZBS and American/Canadian Radio drama company also resells the LotR CDs in the US. So you can watch it anytime you want and at $70 for 13 CDs is a pretty decent deal.
e en =PROD&Store_Code=ZF&Product_Code=LORD&Category_Cod e=KFCD
http://216.122.251.79/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Scr
They also have the Hobbit and their orignal productions of Jack Flanders and Ruby the Galatic Gumshoe.
It seems that smaller communities need to do this as a utility. Comercial companies won't take the time to install the infrastructure since they percieve the risk too high. They don't want to take the time to do the research to determine if it could be profitable.
At the same time it is cost prohibitive to enter the broadband market as a small company, so we don't see small companies offering broadband (not just in small towns but anywhere). This makes it very unlikly that you will get much competition for small communities and it will be years before a large company decides to take the risk.
The other issue is the infrastructure and right of way issues can be a hassle to deal with and are more easily done by a goverment.
So small communities have both unknown market risk, and a scale that doesn't encourage compition so it seems like this makes sense.
So I would definitly say in a small community lobby for municpal Internet and use linking all the goverment buildings together as the basis of the network ring.
Of course if you get too small then your municpality won't have much advatage of scale.
At Linux World SUN was demoing Nautilus in their booth running on Solaris, with a bonobo aware copy of Star Office.
Honestly this is 0.1 release it is still pretty early. And the core team works only on Linux.
If there are any people out there who are interested in ports, please DO! Join the nautilus mailing list and come by #nautilus on irc.gnome.org. We will very happily take your patches.
which distribution you wish to use is which one
is easiest to customize. I have found Debian the easiest to customize to my needs. In most large environments, people don't upgrade machines, they wipe them out and migrate their server data. Debian gives you the choice of upgrading machines.
The real power of debian, is that you can customize one users machine and those customizations will continue across upgrades. Not everyone needs dia, but some subset of people do and they have dia and when the upgrade they still have dia and you don't have to do anything. That is powerfull and usefull. Yes you have to login to someones machine and give them dia the first time.
If you use debian you need dzinstall and you will need to customize the base install.
Another important strategy that has not been
discussed is how do you break this down to groups.
Identify groups of dependent people. The accounting department is all dependent on everyone else there so they should be made a unit. Give them their own server. I would aim for 1 server for every 20-100 users. Those users should be able to function with their server even if the "centralized" servers go down.
each "departmental" server should be backed up, should have a "network drive", a "name server", an "account server", a "network server", "OS Server", "print server"
NFS server
NIS slave
DHCP server
DNS server
Web server (Intranet)
LPD
should server as an apt server or as an rpm server
/net" otherwise it lets users corrupt it) Applixware is clean, fast, stable has
The machine configuration for the department should also live on your central server and should be pushed out to each department using rsync. But by distributing the neccesary services you reduce this risk of a catastrophic failure hitting all users.
NIS/NFS
NIS/NFS security I know it is impossible but they are very convienient and there are some precaustions you can take.
NFS -
users do not have root on NFS clients. IF they do they can be any user on the system.
you keep a static arp table for IP address and you
use static DHCP for clients. And you list every
client that is allowed to connect to your NFS server. Yes this can still be hacked!!!! but someone cannot just bring in a laptop and full control over your users files. Its keeps accidents from happening.
NIS
enforce use of good passwds. this is done by configuring the passwd program.
Make sure you have slave NIS servers!!!! Set the local slave to be the default NIS server for clients.
Don't use broadcast NIS, set the NIS server on each client. Yes someone can still spoof your NIS server, do not let the NIS from the outside internet in. It is worth it to trust your users, becuase it makes your computing environment better and you can trace down who caused problems and get them fired.
Automated Installs.
2500 user machines
assume 50 departmental server and 5 back end master servers.
Buy new equipment and do the master servers correctly.
Replication Strategy.
Make sure you can produce a departmental server from a blank box in 2 hours. Make sure anyone who can read instructions can produce a departmental server in 2 hours. And hopefully that won't be two hours of interactive time.
Given a departmental server, make sure you can build a new desktop from a blank machine in one hour. If cannot you have problems with your automation and your network fix!
USE SOURCE CONTROL all system infromation should be in source control! From the very beginning keep your management scripts, your NIS source files, your deployment descripters in Source control, I reccomend CVS! This will make your life easier.
DESKTOP
as for a desktop, I like windowmaker, I think it is very obvious for beginning users.
WP is substantially lighter than Star Office, and is fairly feature complete. Star office will be a pig, try it out, some users will require it as it is the most feature complete office swuite available on linux. (NOTE DO NOT INSTALL star office so it is user writable, even if there is just one user per machine install it as a net install "setup
strange user interface, and doesn't have the feature count that many people want. And what you see on the screen and what you see on the printer tend to be pretty far off.
I would reccomend avoiding net storage for applications and even all user data. Hard drives are cheap. It makes users less reliant on the network for performance issues. It also makes users for more in control at their workstation and it allows you to customize a workstation to an individuals tastes. (this is why debian is great, you get both customizations and easy upgrades). From a computing efficiency standard this does not make sense the net-slave computers are better. From an employee productivity standard this makes lots of sense.
When setting this up script everything, make sure
the that someone other than the person who solved the problem tries it and can do it.
This is a lot of work and requires formalizing a lot of things. I would reccomend start trying to build the departmental server. The build the things to build the departmental server, destroy it and verify that it can be automaticall built by someone else, using information stored in source control. After that then start doing the end user workstations.
Good LUCK! if you found any of these thoughts usefull do email me.
has become limited by people. Agrarian societies
were limited by natural resources, no matter how
many people or how much monentary capital you had
you could not boost productivity. Here you were born to a job and you kept it for life.
The Industrial age changed that dramtically, new
technology allowed us to extract new ammount of resources through specialization. What was expensive was capital and orginization. Human being were really cheap.
To press that point, durning the industrial revolution we had people that would use small children and women in coal mines, that everyone knew was leathal and did kill them off at young ages. In the US we had "Company Towns" where you earned your wages, rented your house, bought your food, all from the same source. In England you had the department stores that didn't pay you enough to live in London so they put you up in company dormatory and controlled what time you could come home and took over 12 hours of your day. And if you lost your job, you and your family were likely to starve. People used to line
up for jobs, there were surplusses of people, because people were cheap.
In the digital era, our limitiing factor for growth is human beings. Capital is cheap, natural resources are nearly irrelevent, but human beings are tough to get. Yes lots of us do work 12 hour days, but if we get fed up with it we have a job in less than two weeks. We get daily emails, telephone call, cold calls asking us to switch our job. We go the Movies and bombarded by advertisments asking us to go work for some company (at least at the Metreo in SF).
Losing good employee's can destroy a company. Old
military style managers are not just innefective they are a detriment to your company. As individuals we don't requires an extensive pension system, because we have a job market that won't stop. We can move anywhere in the United States and find work without a problem.
Union have become mostly irrelevent becuase the demand is so high that and individual has bargening power with the employer.
From an employment and labor point of view life has changed. I still think that the digital revolution really started in 1995. Yes the technology is much older, but it wasn't untill 1994-1995 that the internet finally became big. Also I believe it is no coincidence that this when productivity started rising in the US. Personal computers had been arround for 15 years and there was no improvment in worker productivity! Computers produced a competitive advantage because they allowed companies to respond faster but until 1995 the return on captital was no better than not having computers.
With that said, we are only five years into the digital communications revolution, give it some time to produce your major social changes! Steam powered looms didn't change the world overnight!
I think a "visual" programming language is a wast of time. Mostly it is usefull for writing reports.
Basic on the Apple and Comodorre 64 were great!
You didn't need to compile! That was pretty nice, just write and run. It was pretty easy to do basic line graphics, there were readily available text games (like Emon games on Apple II) that were easy to modify as a way to learn the programming.
Logo is decent as well. (it is NOT just the turtle). Pascall has was a nice formal language, on the Mac it was easy to integrate with GUI stuff.
I still think Perl should NEVER be a first language for anyone.
I have been wondering about python, with some of gui toolkits as a first language, but there is no decent collections of python childrens programs...
One very scary thing about tech companies in general is that the Stock Options that they give employee's as compensation to make them stick don't count as costs for accounting purposes. But the Options do really count as money, they dilute share holder value, in other words Options really are costs. To quote the Economist "For instance, Microsoft, the world's most valuable company,
declared a profit of $4.5 billion in 1998; when the cost of options awarded that year, plus the change in the value of outstanding options, is
deducted, the firm made a loss of $18 billion, according to Smithers." from 7-Aug-99, sorry a login is required to read old issues.
This is not just a problem with Microsoft but with tech companies in general, I think that this accountancy rules does confuse investors to the profitablity of companies and makes tech companies which have a high percentage of incentive options appear much better on paper than they actually are.
Yes cross platform C++ development is not there and few people are trying to make it work. I consider this a problem.
.h and .c files out of the simple object language (simply impliment objects as structures, or multi-dimensional arrays) and just use a C compiler to get your binaries. This doesn't give you any performance hits compared to C++, and it makes your underlying application code very portable. Abstract out your database interfaces and don't wory about them untill you work with a new version. Build your own communication server that all applications register there messages with and recieve messages from (old style of programming, but it works) and use Inet Sockets. The end result is you can get applications that are n nodes clusterable and the platforms don't matter. The GUI a poor choice was done in this regard they went with Neuron Data (Now Blaze Soft, Formerly Elements, formerly OIT) which really is as slow as tcl/TK at run time without the portability. They now have a Java product that I haven't tried. Right now either TK or Java make the most sense for GUI's to me.
CORBA is neat. It is very cool and fun for writing distributed NETWORK applications. CORBA at this point is only well supported for C++. Several people do have C bindings, but all that I have played with are weak compared to the C++. If I wasn't distributing my processing across a network I might think again about why I need CORBA.
Perl is nice, for any application of any size be prepared to write your own interface. Consider tcl, doesn't do that much, but it embedds itself really nicely and doesn't have any licencing issues to worry about.
Java, is cross platform ready, has some CORBA support, but I believe you have to be careful what orbs you use or write your own interface.
I have worked on several projects that did UNIX/NT work. Both were with companies with a fair ammount of money.
One solution was purchase roguewave (which finally supports linux!) and Iona/Orbix. Roguewave provide very nice C++ libraries, and they are cross platform, among UNIXen and NT. I would love for someone to copy these to the open source world. Orbix is very feature rich, deploys on UNIX and NT (no Linux booo), though at times can be buggy, especially if you try to integrate security into your application. But iona does provide easy programming intrerfaces. End users saw web pages in this particular application. Used CORBA to wrap legacy applications and then quickly integrate them into new applications. Also I have seen nice CORBA implementations on Mainframe which is extremly nice, since talking to mainframes is generally a nightmare. but CORBA isn't very portable either and you have to commit to a specific CORBA.
The second project stuck with C, used plain old Socket Communication. Went with writing an object layer in house (simple but did the job) then writing a tool to create the
Having seen what happens when you go vendor bound, building code interfaces in house with extensability and portability in mind gives you the greatest flexability in the future.
so that is my thoughts about how to tackle cross platfrom distributed appliations.
The accusations of communism really are not justified, even hard core free software people like RMS are NOT communists.
The article describes sharing software so we are not slaves to one another.
It is the SCIENTIFIC METHOD. The "Free Software" "OSS" movement comes directly from the modern scientific method of peer review.
How can I say I have the best software for the job if someone can't look at how I made it and propose better solutions? Most of us don't want the destruction of software companies and free market economies, we just want the BEST software that could possibly exist. There is no other way. Wether you are cathedral modeled like the FSF or bazzare modeled like the linux project, you still just want the best software the world has to offer.
There is a loose tie here between Computer Science and Computer Engineering. In most scientific inquests we expose our results and methodology so other people and try it and verify wether we were correct or not. Anyone who does not release their methodology is not believed.
In an engineering task, like writing software, we are not trying to find truth, but we are trying to find the best way to do things. We want it effecient (works on small resources), feauture complete (does all the things we would like it to), and robust (doesn't stop working just because the wrong thing happend). We cannot verify that we have the best peice of software if we can't look at the code and propose a better solution!
Sure there is an ego trip of being the person who is always finding the best solution, or of showing off your code and having other people use it because it is the best.
But most importantly we just want the best software! Peer review leeds to the best software.
If you want a feature or a bug fix enough, you will learn how to do it, or find someone to do it.
More libatarianism than communism.
Most computers are more than powerfull enough to flood a T1. I am sure the of has plenty of horespower.
As for security. Most of the apple web servers use Apples fairly old ACL per directory for file shareing. The Permission are secure and have stood up to time. As far as connecting to the files system from remote if you use another Mac it does indeed encrypt the passwd.
The Mac has very limited functionality for networking built in on MacOS, this makes it more secure. Apple fixed the TCP/IP large packet bug back in 1995. The current IP stack is fairly fast and based on the System V steam type TCP/IP stack.
Most of the Apple web site security issues have been from Filemaker integration. Filemaker is a GUI DB for MacOS (it has issues).
One of the other advantages to not having any cosole based applications, no concept of standard in and standard out, is if you do run an application on the Mac it doesn't do anything usefull. Also MacOS doesn't have any sensible kind of IPC or RPC support so even if you can compromise a single application it is extremly difficult to get to the operating system or another application.
If you did use Perl, your perl scripts need to be safe. But again on a Mac, there is no plain text file that you could grab security information.
Open BSD could be made equally secure, but it would take lots of customization and intelligence about it, the Mac is VERY high security for default configuration. Though flexibility is an issue with Macs.
As far as I understand, Bob Young has stuck by a couple of key principals.
.... ) who are actually supporting and servicing NT.
Red Hat does not sell Software.
Linux is a loss leader for a deflating market.
First and foremost Red Hat does not sell Software, they give it away for free. I downloaded 6.0 of their website just fine. Didn't pay them a dime. They were happy to have me install it at my work even though they didn't know I had it.
Red Hat Sells Marketing and packaging. Just a company in Seattle we know, but Red Hat doesn't make any pretentions. People by label and brandname, and in return get piece of mind. If Red Hat can stick by that they will do reasonably, they will FAIL to become a monopoly, and they have a chance to make money. People will buy Branding, remember designer Blue Jeans in the 1980's? People payed lots of cash for manufactured images.
#2
Redhat wants to deflate the computer OS market, they want to take a (can't find the numbers from the Sizing the Linux Market article that Bob Young wrote right now) large market and reduce it to 1/10 its current size (total $$ per year spent on server software) and he believes that in that Market Red Hat will take over a larger and larger share. Also it is reasonable to assume that in the Internet server market as prices drop more people will want more servers (small business under 30 people which the plurality of people are employed). Again they can make lots of profit per sale, not have very many sales per people using the product and as long as they stay lean still make a profit.
Also in a market where the services/products are being commoditized (and since they are standards they can be implemented by multiple vendors, increased compition, lower prices, lower profit margins) the biggest way you distinguish yourself is via "exteriors". The biggest exteriors are support/professional services. Will everyone buy them? NO
Most people will never buy proffessional services, but if you have a brand that establishes you as the "Expert" (Red Hat is the biggest distributer of Linux in the US, that makes them an expert), then peole will come to you. It is service where Red Hat is really taking on Microsoft! Microsoft has legendarily poor service especially for corporate support, it is Digital/Compaq who has more NT Service Proffesionals than Microsoft, It is IBM who is selling massive NT Service solutions and your handfull of the usual consultancies (PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Anderson Androids,
And it is those orginizations who have their hands tied. Linux offers them freedom to produce "value added IT services" It alows them to fix late and broken projects by working on the OS, and who are they going to turn to for experts? Whoever has the best branding!
From what I can see Red Hats strategy isn't pretty in the Freedom Software sense, but it is not at odds with it. Red Hat is a scary marketing company, but they are doing the right thing. Red Hat is not a tech company but a marketing company, they need some techs so they have something to help drive their marketing. I wish them the best of luck, as I would love to see a world where the best product wins, and Red Hat is helping that come true.
I see a "advertisement" for Swansa University every time I reboot my Debian Laptop (I should probably setup APM). And on my SuSE and RedHat boxes I see adds for Novell whenever they reboot. (when the IPX driver loads.) This is fine. If companies, want to sponser a word processor, and put their name on the Title Bar, the buttons and splash screens, I am not even going to bother to remove it. I apreciate them making that software possible, assuming it is Free Software (FSF Free).
Though this does have some bearing on the next version of GPL, people who pay for software are faciltators of software. They should have their names irrovocibly added to the README, something silly like "Nike Sponsored the additions of Shoe Mode to Emacs" and in X window when I run Emacs in Shoe mode I see a Nike swoosh. Now I could remove the swoosh, but I couldn't remove the reference to Nike in the README and redistribute it.
I don't know who is going to pay much money for such advertising, but they could probably do it and still get a tax deduction, like PBS, you can sponser programs you get an Add at the end of the program and you can write it off your taxes. I sounds like a nice idea.
We need to marry the suits and hackers to make the world a better place. Hackers are great at making software but are poor at hardware and enlightening the rest of the world.
Suits can HELP.
They can pay us to write "FREE" code.
They can give us access to fun hardware.
They can provide the SERVICES that the rest of the world needs.
Many business don't need great software they need great services, implimentation plans, defaults, promisses of emotional security and support.
Hackers do a horrible job of providing this.
Let the suits provide services for hackers software, let them add back to the community. But let them come to the hacker community on our terms. Educate and assimilate. There is nothing wrong with them trying to make some money as long as they do it appropriatly. Sometimes you have the money and not the skill, hire someone with the skill, lots of software is service, and if people want to pay to have other people configure their systems, tell them how to do it, or just talk on the phone GREAT!
Suits will bring propriatary software. Just don't let them do anything core to the Network or System. Propriatary applications are fine, they can be excellent inspiration for another "FREE" project.
The world moves because we will it. Keep hacking, keep having fun and the world will be a better place. We like to get money for toys, housing, and food (except RMS who seems to consider poverty saintly). Those people who want our skills should pay, and in our free time we can hack. Just make sure that you get the FREE time!
For a short article, it did have a surprisingly lot of important information. This is a great thing, the Econmist has a relativly small circulation, but a very high circulation among, heads of business and government.
The observation that Open Source could be and should be the Freeways of the future for digital commerce is an excellent one.
Open Source is great for Capitalism. The infra-structure needs to be public, it will be most efficient way for people to communicate. People like windows because they can share programs and files. Free software should replace that as the common ground.
Not all software will become "Free," games, and specialized software will always get someone to pay. (for games at least as long as hardware advances rapidly).
Also for as many enemies as ESR has made, he IS the leading intellectual among the hacker community, he has written better essays than any one else.
Katz is useful information for evangalists, and for distribution developers. It is interesting to be reminded of the experience of newbies, too quickly we forget.
I like to read how people become confused and muddled. Why people think Linux is traumatic. I think one thing Katz has exposed is how much garbage is out their for Linux books. I never have a Linux specific book other than a manual from a comercial distribution and by the time I had that it was too late anyway. Sometimes it seems strange that it might be difficult to install linux. I had a laptop with Win95 from work that crashed, I downloaded the install disks on my housemates macintosh, made the floppies booted my AST laptop and let it install over night via ftp, in the morning I had a functioning laptop.
Katz is also interesting in that he is a computing freedom evangalist, who has only gotten to the idea of freedom and not yet experienced it. I hope he can get through his confused, but common, methods of freeing himself from other companies ideas of how he should use information.
I really like DVD. It is a nice medium, that takes the convienience of CD and brings it to video. Unlike some peoples complaints about pixilization here, they are unfounded. Yes there are issues on high grade video, but that is not what you get from the video store. DVD fails as a media for profesional mixing but pixlated high resolution is better than grainy low resolution. The sound is nice as well.
While I am a firm LP for quality sound man. VHS has multiple failings. One VCRs use variable gain so dynamic range of sound and sound quality is not preserved. Could Analog tape be a better media? Yes. When I rent "Apocalypse Now" and view it at home will it look and sound better on DVD or VHS? Definitly DVD. Not to mention how grainy and worn out video places let their video's get.
Though I have to admit I have already rented a scratched up DVD from blockbuster.
DIVIX is a dumb idea. I think it is a niche market to make some money for a little while, then toss. (and leave the DIVIX purchasers with an overpriced piece of crap that can't get new DIVIX titles.)
People still go to the close place ot rent videos. DIVIX makes people go to circuit city and pay more to "rent" a video. And if I want to buy, I can still purchase from Blockbuster, Amazon.COM, Fry's, Best Buy.....
The common fool will eventually succumb to his pocket book.
I want one of those new apple cases for my PC!
(no M$ ever, no Intel AMD & VIA)
I hate scraping my knuckles on the poorly built
Aztec and Enlight cases. I want a cases that
gives me easy access to my MB, while it is running.
Apple G3 case is entirely usable. I like haveing a few more colors in my workspace, sure it will be tacky in 3 years but so will my computer.
Easy access, The Handles I like as they prevent it
from actually resting on the floor, for those occasional spills. Being able to open while running is way cool! Sure it runs a little cooler when you run with no case, but you dust death rate goes way up....
Now Apple needs to offer the case without the logo... and with holes for ATX form factor. Then I could have a decent PC case.