It's simply round-robin DNS to a bunch of web servers. It's a reasonable technique for your goals, but it's got nothing to do with the original question, which was how to keep his company online when one ISP/connection/link fails, and to both outgoing and incoming traffic of all kinds find the right place to go.
Re:They've made a mistake.
on
AOL Patents IM
·
· Score: 2
No, because what will happen is that MS will trade them one of their (MS's) patents for the right to use AOLs IM patent. The point is to shut out Free stuff like Jabber.
If I have a username on your system, then I have half the information I need to login to it. Admittedly, less useful than it used to be, but better than nothing.
Everyone bitches about the cost of stamps (with some justification)
Really? The USPO will carry one ounce of goods across the country, door-to-door, for $0.37. That sounds like an incredible bargain to me.
As far as junk mail goes, I'm not convinced that that underwriting first-class mail (which it certainly does) is, overall, of sufficient value to outweigh the total cost (paper consumed, waste disposal, time impact).
So? This happens even if you use only MSWord!
Slightly different versions, different underlying DLLs, different printer drivers, etc. etc. etc. If you really expect the same document to produce the same output on different machines, and the document is at all complex, Word just ain't going to cut it.
(I suppose it's possible that Word has dramatically improved in this respect since Office '97, but it seems unlikely.)
While I obviously don't speak for the FSF, I'd guess the answer is that it doesn't really matter whether the code is released or not, because unless it is released as Free Software (by their definition, which is not limited to the GPL), it's not usuable in other Free Software.
More accurately, even if it is released under (say) the BSD license, it's still not really free, because of the (not-so-) hidden trap of the patent license. (Just because you the right to use, modify, and distribute the code that implements the patented technology doesn't make it possible to use the resulting program, if doing so violates the patent license.)
Word 2 could do bold, italic, underlines, and did a pretty good job of getting the line/page breaks right on a standard DOS console (basically a lame vt100) back in 1985. Given the references in the original question, that seemed to be level of "WYSIWYG" the original poster was interested in.
Regardless, PICO is NOT a word processor in any way, shape, or form. It's a text editor.
And when did pico become a WYSIWYG word-processor? Read the question!
I think it's a dead end. Either run DOS and
find old copies of MS Word 2 (which was a great
product...), or get slightly more powerful machines
and run something like lyx. Or teach people how to
use nroff/groff -- probably easier for non-geeks than TeX.
I don't know about is other work, but the prose in "House Atriedes" was close to unreadable. Dreadful. Awful. So bad that the only reason I finished it was that was that I was stuck somewhere with nothing else to read, and I'm a reading addict.
Whether the prose is the fault of K. Anderson or B. Herbert I've no idea, and I'm not likely to find out as I've no intention of wasting my time with anything else by either them unless recommended by someone I trust.
And it's not like I'm a snobbish about such things. Not everyone can be a Simmons or Ellison. But I don't like to flinch while reading.
Spoken like someone whose never worked with incompetent management. I know quite well what it takes to run a company. I've worked with many *good* managers.They've made decisions I may not agree with, but for understandable reasons. They were universally able to explain the decision, and what their priorities were.
I've also worked with many whose primary purpose in life is to advance their career while making sure that no bad decisions can be traced to them, although they of course are all over the credit for anything good. Unfortunately, because of this way of working, they tend to infiltrate high enough to protect each other, while shooting down the good people as threats to their position.
If you've never worked in such an environment, you're damn lucky.
As for myself, I know work in a reasonably successful 6 person company. You damn well better
believe I've got some idea of what it takes to run a company, and how to make *business* justifications for technical work.
Unions are the last refuge of the inept and the inflexible
Before you make such an ignorant comment, I suggest you read a little history about what working class life was like before unions. Or what such life
is like in non-unionized countries. Or what's been happening in the US as the power of the unions has been undermined by the plutocrats who run our country.
Sure, there are problems with specific unions, and specific situation. Guess what? There is no perfect system. But if you want to see a real refuge for "the inept and the inflexible", I suggest you look into the manager and low-level VP ranks of any significantly sized company. It sure isn't those folk who get laid off when the senior management fscks up.
A second piece of advice -- discount the application developers hardware requirements heavily. When specing equipment, most application groups pad numbers throughout 10-15%. When the final requirements are forwarded up, the developer's manager inflate those inflated numbers by 20-200%.
Oh, there's some brilliant advice for a successful project. Sigh. Yes, the developers tend to overstate hardware requirements. They do this because the DB vendor understated them and the clients change (increase) the application requirements, and guess who gets blamed when it's
too slow?
The rest of the duffbeer703's advice is reasonable, but ignore this (or at least be very
careful about it.) It's a hell of lot easier to buy some expansion capability now than to try to upgrade later, or spend 100s of hours tweaking the
DB/apps to make them 'faster'.
Oh, and in general, buying enough RAM to
hold the (used part) of the DB in memory will get
you a lot more perfomance than a faster/additional
CPU. But it really depends on the workload. As everyone else notes.
Would to God that I were indeed left out. Being left
out would be fine. The jerk yakking on his/her cell-phone at 3x normal speaking volume is not leaving me out, they are forcing me to listen
to their crap. If I started reading my book out
loud at the same volume (or anywhere close), people would (quite rightly) object.
And just what is *SO* fucking important
that it can't wait until said jerk is on the ground? People went for 80 years w/o being able
to make phone calls from airplanes, and suddenly
it's vital to their life? Crap. Public cell phone
conversations are invariably inane useless chatter, designed primarily use the insanely
large number of "free" minutes that came with
the plan.
The world is full of enough yakking. Planes used to be one place that I could actually sit
and read for n straight hours. Just shut up and
read, or listen to music, or talk *quietly* with
your neighbor. People are so full of their "rights" that they've forgotten their responsibilites. One of your responsibilities is
not be a rude jerk to strangers.
It's not aimed at you (or rather, it is, in theory, but it's way overkill, and you'll spend more time doing meta-work than actually getting things accomplished.)
Instead, read some of the articles at Joel On Software, especially the
Painless Software Schedules and
Painless Functional Specifications He's somewhat arrogant, and he's a Windows developer (ex-Microsoft), but he's dead right on how to do basic functional specs and schedules. Once you've got something basic worked up, and have actually used it on a couple of projects, you can start looking at ways to improve.
If you need more tools than that, you can't possibly call yourself a software developer.
You must be one of those rare lucky bastards who works for a company that has people a) to take care of the hardware, and b) are actually competent to do so, and c) are around when you need them.
Back here in the real world, my primary job function is most certainly "software developer", and that's what I call myself, but somebody has to re-arrange the test lab, replace harddrives and memory, etc. etc. etc. And no, it wouldn't be cheaper/more efficient to hire an additional person to take care of that kind of stuff -- it's not a full time job, but it still has to be done.
You must have had a tougher breed of TMs than I ran into The few times I tried it, I got at least a sort of hesitatation, followed by "ummm", at which point I hung up. I vastly prefer the first game ("I'll get her"), as they *will* hang on for at least a few minutes, and I've potentially wasted as much of their time as they have mine. Of course, my time is much more valuable...
I suspect the intent of the law was to forbid dialing numbers that weren't on some pre-established telemarking list, but the wording was (too specific | not specific enough.)
Good. You can also bug him about not having a useful webmaster address, or other contact information on the site. E-mail to both
webmaster@www.cacert.com and webmaster@cacert.com bounced:
webmaster@cacert.com: host mail.mediadome.net.au[210.8.208.1] said: 553
sorry, that domain isn't in my list of allowed rcpthosts (#5.7.1)
Nice idea. Unfortunately, the MD5 fingerprint on the root certificate doesn't match what the webpage claims it should be. This leads to doubts...
I suspect what happened is that they issued a new certificate on September 15th, and forgot to update the webpage. But that kind of sloppiness is not reassuring, and the fact that nobody has fixed it in 17 days indicates that it's probably not very widely used. (And yes, I e-mailed the webmaster about the problem.)
The so-called "Kernel Driver File" source tar.gz contains a big honkin' (>1M) binary
module. The supplied source code is simply a shim
between the kernel and the binary module. Hardly
"Open Source".
So, are you going to donate the $60K to SPI so that Debian can redistribute xmms? I'd guess not. This won't kill MP3, but it will kill MP3 with free software. Oh well...
Yes, the have the patent, and the right to license the patent as they choose. Their choice (make it free until it's widely used, then start charging money) makes them assholes. This is exactly what happens when you start relying on patented technology, and proves that the folks over at Xiph were right all along.
As far as $0.75/per unit being trivial, you should investigate the economics of consumer electronics. That $0.75 might well be half the profit on a low-end device.
Slashdot Mirror
It's simply round-robin DNS to a bunch of web servers. It's a reasonable technique for your goals, but it's got nothing to do with the original question, which was how to keep his company online when one ISP/connection/link fails, and to both outgoing and incoming traffic of all kinds find the right place to go.
No, because what will happen is that MS will trade them one of their (MS's) patents for the right to use AOLs IM patent. The point is to shut out Free stuff like Jabber.
Valuable information like the username?
If I have a username on your system, then I have half the information I need to login to it. Admittedly, less useful than it used to be, but better than nothing.
Everyone bitches about the cost of stamps (with some justification)
Really? The USPO will carry one ounce of goods across the country, door-to-door, for $0.37. That sounds like an incredible bargain to me.
As far as junk mail goes, I'm not convinced that that underwriting first-class mail (which it certainly does) is, overall, of sufficient value to outweigh the total cost (paper consumed, waste disposal, time impact).
Images can move around, hide text, etc.
So? This happens even if you use only MSWord! Slightly different versions, different underlying DLLs, different printer drivers, etc. etc. etc. If you really expect the same document to produce the same output on different machines, and the document is at all complex, Word just ain't going to cut it.
(I suppose it's possible that Word has dramatically improved in this respect since Office '97, but it seems unlikely.)
While I obviously don't speak for the FSF, I'd guess the answer is that it doesn't really matter whether the code is released or not, because unless it is released as Free Software (by their definition, which is not limited to the GPL), it's not usuable in other Free Software.
More accurately, even if it is released under (say) the BSD license, it's still not really free, because of the (not-so-) hidden trap of the patent license. (Just because you the right to use, modify, and distribute the code that implements the patented technology doesn't make it possible to use the resulting program, if doing so violates the patent license.)
Test your backup. Not just once, but periodically.
Two cents from a (different) old admin.
Word 2 could do bold, italic, underlines, and did a pretty good job of getting the line/page breaks right on a standard DOS console (basically a lame vt100) back in 1985. Given the references in the original question, that seemed to be level of "WYSIWYG" the original poster was interested in.
Regardless, PICO is NOT a word processor in any way, shape, or form. It's a text editor.
And when did pico become a WYSIWYG word-processor? Read the question!
I think it's a dead end. Either run DOS and find old copies of MS Word 2 (which was a great product...), or get slightly more powerful machines and run something like lyx. Or teach people how to use nroff/groff -- probably easier for non-geeks than TeX.
>> 3. Red Hat / SuSE / Debian / Mandrake / other distros.
[*snip*]
#3 - Most likely of all - they're directly profiting from the sale
Really? Debian is directly profiting the sale of Linux? Nobody told me that! I want my share!
I don't know about is other work, but the prose in "House Atriedes" was close to unreadable. Dreadful. Awful. So bad that the only reason I finished it was that was that I was stuck somewhere with nothing else to read, and I'm a reading addict.
Whether the prose is the fault of K. Anderson or B. Herbert I've no idea, and I'm not likely to find out as I've no intention of wasting my time with anything else by either them unless recommended by someone I trust.
And it's not like I'm a snobbish about such things. Not everyone can be a Simmons or Ellison. But I don't like to flinch while reading.
Spoken like someone whose never worked with incompetent management. I know quite well what it takes to run a company. I've worked with many *good* managers.They've made decisions I may not agree with, but for understandable reasons. They were universally able to explain the decision, and what their priorities were.
I've also worked with many whose primary purpose in life is to advance their career while making sure that no bad decisions can be traced to them, although they of course are all over the credit for anything good. Unfortunately, because of this way of working, they tend to infiltrate high enough to protect each other, while shooting down the good people as threats to their position. If you've never worked in such an environment, you're damn lucky.
As for myself, I know work in a reasonably successful 6 person company. You damn well better believe I've got some idea of what it takes to run a company, and how to make *business* justifications for technical work.
Unions are the last refuge of the inept and the inflexible
Before you make such an ignorant comment, I suggest you read a little history about what working class life was like before unions. Or what such life is like in non-unionized countries. Or what's been happening in the US as the power of the unions has been undermined by the plutocrats who run our country.
Sure, there are problems with specific unions, and specific situation. Guess what? There is no perfect system. But if you want to see a real refuge for "the inept and the inflexible", I suggest you look into the manager and low-level VP ranks of any significantly sized company. It sure isn't those folk who get laid off when the senior management fscks up.
A second piece of advice -- discount the application developers hardware requirements heavily. When specing equipment, most application groups pad numbers throughout 10-15%. When the final requirements are forwarded up, the developer's manager inflate those inflated numbers by 20-200%.
Oh, there's some brilliant advice for a successful project. Sigh. Yes, the developers tend to overstate hardware requirements. They do this because the DB vendor understated them and the clients change (increase) the application requirements, and guess who gets blamed when it's too slow?
The rest of the duffbeer703's advice is reasonable, but ignore this (or at least be very careful about it.) It's a hell of lot easier to buy some expansion capability now than to try to upgrade later, or spend 100s of hours tweaking the DB/apps to make them 'faster'.
Oh, and in general, buying enough RAM to hold the (used part) of the DB in memory will get you a lot more perfomance than a faster/additional CPU. But it really depends on the workload. As everyone else notes.
RANT MODE ON:
Would to God that I were indeed left out. Being left out would be fine. The jerk yakking on his/her cell-phone at 3x normal speaking volume is not leaving me out, they are forcing me to listen to their crap. If I started reading my book out loud at the same volume (or anywhere close), people would (quite rightly) object.
And just what is *SO* fucking important that it can't wait until said jerk is on the ground? People went for 80 years w/o being able to make phone calls from airplanes, and suddenly it's vital to their life? Crap. Public cell phone conversations are invariably inane useless chatter, designed primarily use the insanely large number of "free" minutes that came with the plan.
The world is full of enough yakking. Planes used to be one place that I could actually sit and read for n straight hours. Just shut up and read, or listen to music, or talk *quietly* with your neighbor. People are so full of their "rights" that they've forgotten their responsibilites. One of your responsibilities is not be a rude jerk to strangers.
It's not aimed at you (or rather, it is, in theory, but it's way overkill, and you'll spend more time doing meta-work than actually getting things accomplished.)
Instead, read some of the articles at Joel On Software, especially the Painless Software Schedules and Painless Functional Specifications He's somewhat arrogant, and he's a Windows developer (ex-Microsoft), but he's dead right on how to do basic functional specs and schedules. Once you've got something basic worked up, and have actually used it on a couple of projects, you can start looking at ways to improve.
If you need more tools than that, you can't possibly call yourself a software developer.
You must be one of those rare lucky bastards who works for a company that has people a) to take care of the hardware, and b) are actually competent to do so, and c) are around when you need them.
Back here in the real world, my primary job function is most certainly "software developer", and that's what I call myself, but somebody has to re-arrange the test lab, replace harddrives and memory, etc. etc. etc. And no, it wouldn't be cheaper/more efficient to hire an additional person to take care of that kind of stuff -- it's not a full time job, but it still has to be done.
You must have had a tougher breed of TMs than I ran into The few times I tried it, I got at least a sort of hesitatation, followed by "ummm", at which point I hung up. I vastly prefer the first game ("I'll get her"), as they *will* hang on for at least a few minutes, and I've potentially wasted as much of their time as they have mine. Of course, my time is much more valuable...
I suspect the intent of the law was to forbid dialing numbers that weren't on some pre-established telemarking list, but the wording was (too specific | not specific enough.)
Conversation 1:
Telemarketer: "Hello, may I speak with the lady of the house?"
Me: "Sure, hang on a second." Then I put the phone down and go on with whatever I was doing. Come back 10 minutes later and hang it up.
Conversation 2:
TM: "Hello, may I speak to to Mrs. Mole?"
Me (sobbing): "No, she died last week. Is it important?"
Then the company you worked for is (probably) violating the law. (True in Texas and many other states.)
Good. You can also bug him about not having a useful webmaster address, or other contact information on the site. E-mail to both webmaster@www.cacert.com and webmaster@cacert.com bounced:
Nice idea. Unfortunately, the MD5 fingerprint on the root certificate doesn't match what the webpage claims it should be. This leads to doubts...
I suspect what happened is that they issued a new certificate on September 15th, and forgot to update the webpage. But that kind of sloppiness is not reassuring, and the fact that nobody has fixed it in 17 days indicates that it's probably not very widely used. (And yes, I e-mailed the webmaster about the problem.)
The so-called "Kernel Driver File" source tar.gz contains a big honkin' (>1M) binary module. The supplied source code is simply a shim between the kernel and the binary module. Hardly "Open Source".
So, are you going to donate the $60K to SPI so that Debian can redistribute xmms? I'd guess not. This won't kill MP3, but it will kill MP3 with free software. Oh well...
Yes, the have the patent, and the right to license the patent as they choose. Their choice (make it free until it's widely used, then start charging money) makes them assholes. This is exactly what happens when you start relying on patented technology, and proves that the folks over at Xiph were right all along.
As far as $0.75/per unit being trivial, you should investigate the economics of consumer electronics. That $0.75 might well be half the profit on a low-end device.