San Francisco is a major tourist attraction, there is no doubt. The toll booths are just another way of getting more money from the tourists. But there is another aspect to this. Lots of people want to live in moron county, and commute to SF or even to Silicon Valley. I don't know what the toll is these days. I do remember once it was $3. Lets see 5 days a week, four weeks a year, that $60 a month. As if gas wasn't enough of an expense for the hardworking locals, with the strained economy, a $60/month additional expense just worsens the pain. And add to that the cost of parking in the city. Now employers in San Francisco have to pay their employee more to offset the travel, toll, and parking fees. That doesn't make SF as attractive a place to have a business. Having lived and operated a business in SF before, a remember vividly commuting from the North Bay, over the bridge, and working my way to Noe Valley to do my days work. Eventually I just burned out on the commute and started working from home in Tiberon. The company grew and relocated to South San Francisco because business locations were prohibitively expensive in SF, on top of everything else. The lack of a BART transit from the North-West Bay to the City causes massive commuting by automobile. Ride sharing helps, but it is still a glut of cars doing the daily transit, and the time wasted at the slow toll area is just more overhead time the employee has to tolerate for the sake of being employed.
I live in Santa Maria which, while not a huge city, has quite a few people who live around town. I have a home in a subdivision, and I know there is a pop at the entrance several hundred yards away. Every year or so, I check to see where DSL speed is, and I always get the same answer. Verizon wants $39 per month for a 1.5Mb/sec DSL. I am using Comcast cable high speed internet (so called business service). I had to sign up for their business service to get any fixed IP numbers. Speakeasy Speedtest says I am getting 25.28Mbps downward, and 4.88 Mbps upward. The problem I have is that I am getting my so called "business class internet" over the same cable is the home cable TV users in my subdivision. At peak usage times, my downward can get as low as 2Mbps, when the neighbors are torrenting I suspect. I have about one outage a month, usually lasting eight hours or longer. Every several months I have a complete failure, and I discover that a technician unplugged my cable at the nearby box, because I don't have video service any more, and he doesn't know I have business internet. Recently my downward dropped to modem speeds, and a technical came out and discovered that the previous technician that accessed the local box, put a video filter on my line backwards, again to make sure I am not trying to get video. I pay slightly over one hundred dollars a month for this service, and I had to sign for a three year contract to get the fixed IP's at all. They wouldn't slave the reverse DNS to my server either, something every previous internet service provider had done for me. Although I am on the central coast just north of Santa Barbara, my packets hit the Internet somewhere around Livermore, east of Oakland in the Bay Area. There is no Verizon Fios in my subdivision. And the copper phone lines here are so bad, you are lucky to get a stable 28Kb connection with a quality modem. When my contract is up, I am going to stop paying over a hundred a month. I won't have a fixed IP any more,, but with the poop uptime numbers I get with Comcast, I can't try to operate any serious server based services out of my location. Although this is a so called business class connection I have, there are no committed rates available t me from Comcast at any cost. Getting a T1 in here would probably require me to pay for a quarter mile trench, the cost of which would probably exceed my equity in my home. So I have enjoyed to connection most of the time, as a casual user, but any ideas I had about using it for business went up in smoke when I discovered how unreliable the service was. I can't guarantee my Internet based services to my clients, depending on Comcast business service as my provider.
We could call it prescient memory, and it could recall data from the future as well as the past. You wouldn't even have to write the data into it, or give it the address of the data you want because it knows what you want before you ask.
I was reading the technical specs on the Z80 recently, and the Zilog designers were brilliant in their CPU design which automatically refreshed the dynamic ram by using a self incrementing "R" register to traverse enough addresses to do the full refresh. That was back in the late 70's and 80's, and that more or less the same dynamic ram is with us still. We could use some advances in that area. It seems like we are struggling to find the elegant memory solution. When I started with computers, we were writing into a core to sense it's state then having to write the information back. That was clever, but inefficient. Now we have dynamic memory that wants to go to sleep, and we have to nudge it regularly to keep it awake. I hope in my lifetime we finally see a memory technology that is actually straightforward and elegant.
The so-called "over-priced computers with intel processors" are staying viable and lasting years longer than the PC's I have bought. Apple sells well designed and supported hardware that has excellent quality control when it comes to the OS working well on the hardware. When I bought my 8-core 3.0GHz Xeon Mac Pro, it cost more than a clone, but then again the 3.0GHz Xeon CPUs were only being shipped by Intel to Apple, and I got extra performance for my extra money. Also my three year old Mac Pro is running very well, compared to any three year old Windows machines I purchased from other vendors. Non-apple machines running Windows 7 run like crap, and when you buy a machine with Windows 7 Home Pro, it doesn't take long to discover you have to buy an upgrade to get the XP emulator so you can run all you legacy software. If you haven't used a Mac day after day, and experienced the responsive, solid, Mac OS performance, are you really qualified to say their machines are overpriced?
If you eliminated Microsoft from history, Digital Research would have provided CP/M-86 for the PC and their operating systems were not open source. However Gary Kildall was significantly more benevolent than Bill Gates IMHO. CP/M, then Concurrent w/Gem would have gone down the GUI route. The thing about DRI though was that they didn't pile on new software on top of old. They re-engineered their operating systems, and they were lean and mean.
The author of netware was rightly proud of the fact that there were only a few hundred machine instructions between the wire and the disk. For a few years after Microsoft tried to enter the network server arena, their Lan Manager was considered a joke in comparison to NetWare. IMHO the reason MS overtook NetWare subsequently had to do with marketing muscle more than technical merits.
When the RAID manufacturer INFORTREND wanted their Santa Rosa office on the Internet. I got them to sign up for a frame relay with Sonic.Net. Then I installed a FreeBSD system that ran email and web and DNS flawlessly for years. I got Samba running and integration with their Windows 200 Pro workstations. I did whatever it took to keep their domain alive, and when their frame relay went down, I re-hosted their WEB and MAIL, and because I was the secondary, their clients still had FTP support. I had (what I thought was) a great relationship with the Tech Support Manager whom I reported to. Eventually the chinese mother company get a new CIO in silicon valley who mandated Microsoft for DNS, WEB, and Exchange for email. When asked to roll out all this crap, I refused for various reasons. They fired me, the Tech Support Manager accused me of letting him down and of bad faith. All that "good faith" I thought I had built up over four or so years of great service was vaporized in an instant when Microsoft reared it's ugly head in their enterprise. The manager whom I had thought was one of my best friends, I guess was forced to drink the coolaid by his company. What a waste of my devotion to a client. Oh I felt good about my performance, but both of us felt betrayed, and for what?
I have worked in all sorts of situations. In some, the environment was so stimulating I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning, and sad when the day was over. Most software people I know have gone through the same process. Young people go to work for older people, work on handshake, verbal promises, no written specification, with a schedule written by someone who is clueless about how long things take. Ego powers them through a project or two, but don't realize several things... Youthful energy doesn't last forever, good health doesn't last forever, business people often tell you whatever you want to hear to keep things going. This sort of behavior can get a startup going, until the hammer drops. The IRS comes through and you find out the employer who said he was paying you under the table has 1099'd you and you owe big bucks. The company incorporates, and the new accountant tells your boss you can't be paid under the table. The boss tells you accounting says you are what's called an exempt employee and cannot be paid overtime. Eventually you get a little smarter and you ask for a royalty, but the boss is still one step ahead of you and you accept a percentage of the net, not the gross, but you don't get to say anything about expense control, and since the boss is driving a mercedes and always flies first class and always seems to have plenty of coke, there is never any profits, and your royalty isn't worth sniffing at. Then you get smarter and you ask for stock. The boss agrees, but doesn't tell you there are different kinds. You are thrilled to get 10,000 shares but don't realize those are non-voting shares and the boss has fifty million shares. When the company needs some money, they issue another hundred million shares to sell to clueless investors, and your 10,000 shares get diluted out from under you, and you don't find out until later. Eventually vesting times come and you have to fork up money to buy the shares at promised option price. Soon afterward they issue more stock and the actual value of your stock becomes a fraction of what you paid. Then they need a marketing VP, and he wants 10 million shares also, then the CEO, he get 40 million. Then the boss feels he needs to hire ten more people, and then they need to move into bigger digs. The boss discovers it's not what you own, but what you have the use of, so he leases a rolls (he needs it to impress potential clients). Meanwhile you are working on a 286-16 and the salesman is carrying a state of the art pentium notebook, and he gets a leased car too. The boss declines to buy you that $200 software toolkit that would make your job easier because accounting says he needs to watch expenses. Then they need to drop $40,000 on a set of magazine ads, a full page each week for 20 weeks in PC Magazine. The boss tells you he has to wait a couple of days to issue checks because they are waiting on cash flow. Then a few days later, you go to work, and the place is closed. you can't even get to the computer you brought from home to use for work because they couldn't afford to get you one, and it takes a while for you to wrangle it away from the creditors who want to liquidate any assets in sight to get some of their money back. This scenario is not just some story... It happens every day in silicon valley, and berkeley, and anytown, USA. It only takes a few of these experiences and you start to learn more about contracts, what you will and won't do for money, or promises of money, and to "Get it in Writing".
I remember that. In 1972, ARPA net users were asked not to play chess on MIT-DMCG in the daytime. Those were the days of the 2400 baud leased lines. Things are obviously different now:-)
That would depend on whether the improvement was in the link between the local pop and the CO, or whether the last mile got better. Over time the speed that fiber transducers can handle increases, and there is a long way to go yet before we can say we have hit the speed limit on the fiber. Where I live, the copper is so bad the DSL cannot even run reliably at 3Mb downward, and I refuse to pay $39/mo for 1.5Mb DSL. My cable internet is generally running at 16+Mb/sec downward and 4Mb upward. I think what is going on is that they put better coax in between my home and the pop at the edge of my subdivision, and it is probably fiber from there onward. But my business internet service is running off the same cable as my neighbors residential service, and when they start running torrent 24x7, my service degrades terribly. Why? Because even though I have a "business internet service", there is no committed information rate for me, and while things are usually good, I cannot count on the service from day to day. What good are my fixed IP numbers, if I cannot rely on the service to perform on any day, or at any bitrate? I was having trouble with my throughput recently, and a tech came out and found my problem was that a Comcast worker had come out and placed a filter on my feed to prevent any possibility of me receiving unauthorized video. But they put the filter in backwards, and it mucked up my internet for weeks.
It is not about data particularly, but phone minutes. A few years ago I was having some financial problems and I had some creditors calling me constantly on my cell phone trying to collect. When I saw I as approaching my limit, I shut off the phone for the rest of the month. Then I received a bill for hundreds of dollars in overages because the provider was charging me air time while callers were leaving voicemail. I called the provider and asked what I could do to prevent this, and all they could recommend was closing my account, which of course would cause a $175 early termination fee.
I found a new provider after that, although one is very much like another, as we all know.
Now having decided not to use plasma based power systems, Tokyo is again on the verge of another round of massive destruction.
I have been studying this, and I am fairly sure that these new supercomputers will emit electromagnetic frequencies that will
attract Godzilla, and perhaps other dangerous monsters currently at rest. We would have to ask the twin fairies to be sure,
but I think this is a dire threat to Shibuya, and surrounding areas. Having lived there, I would hate to see it destroyed again.
I hate this idea for the same reason I hate the current CA system. I wasn't paying that much attention to the relationship of verisign and netsol, but it seems verisign (who bought thawte) has a veritable monopoly on server certificates. A perfect example of how that goes bad was the issuing of the bogus microsoft.com signing cert that compromised microsoft's active X controls. A little bit of social engineering, and poof, there goes another rubber tree plant.
Oh the idea is elegant, I give Anthony that. But the only entity I can trust is the LORD GOD and if we could get him to sign certificates (root@universe.org), then we could really have a chain of trust. Another part of what is going wrong is the IPV4 system, whose shortage of addresses gives ICANN the power to charge big bucks for IP allocations, and to make policy about how addresses are granted, and to whom. I don't have a workable better idea, but hanging the IP's and domains off the CA's (commercial assholes) bothers me.
I believe the question of what shall become of the Internet is very important. I would be fascinated though to hear what possible justification there could be for letting WOZ sit on it. The class of people that should be thinking about this issue are people like the folks that designed the Internet to begin with, BBN. Perhaps some representatives from Anti-virus companies to explain Internet pollution. The fellow that did most of the work on DNS. Some people from the telecoms that understand the growth factors. Having invented the cheapest floppy controller does not make one an expert on the Internet. Marshall Rose would be a good candidate because he foresaw decades ago the need to transition into IP V6.
I have been writing programs lately on my computer. I has an old CPU, and what would be considered a small HD. OK the CPU is 386/20 and the HD is 20MB. This might sound small but it is not so bad when your language tools fit on one floppy. IMHO it is MS and Windows that have driven our space sensibilities mad. OK multimedia needs space, but that was what optical media was for. The point I was trying to make is that we were able to do a lot of great stuff with one thousandth of the space. 640K of ram was a lot when you were writing in assembler, and 40MB of HD was quite a bit for casual use. These days, it's, "I want one thousand billion bytes of storage on my computer, or I feel deprived" Just how much storage do you need in your hand? Can't you shift some of it to your house server, or your provider's server, or some higher level server. Just because you can doesn't mean it's a good idea to carry the library of congress in your phone. Massive portable data storage has led to massive data compromises. Oh well my humble opinion.
First we had the anti-virus vendors saying, "That's a nice computer you have there, it would be a shame if something happened to it. But if you pay us protection money, and you do have a problem, we will hide our support phone numbers behind a multitude of help screens that go around in circles.
Then we have Intel building security into their processors, and Microsoft decides not to use it. A while later Microsoft and Intel decide native code writers cannot be trusted and provide system-wide controls to keep "non-managed code" from running.
Computers being certified to be free of malware is like hookers being certified to be free of STDs. The certification is good for a few minutes, and then you are back to square one.
The healthiest thing we could do for the Internet would be to ban all Windows machines until Microsoft can prove that their operating systems are robust enough to survive on the Internet. If Microsoft operating systems need anti-virus enhancements, I think Microsoft should pay for that. After several years of paying for Symantec, the anti-virus software has costed more than the computer did to begin with.
And of course what makes this even more scary is Microsoft's demonstrated ability to wag around the US Government and get whatever they want. The decision to store public data in a proprietary format continues to astound me.
And others here have mentioned the fact that a company that cannot produce a secure operating system should not be trusted to judge the health of anyone else's systems.
Thirty years ago Marshall Rose saw the roadmap to IPV6 and spoke of peaceful co-existence and transition. Every few years I hear the rumbles about running out of IPV4 numbers and I wonder why the people that earn big bucks, and the companies with big bucks haven't figured this out. The original Internet happened because people wanted it to work, and it wasn't about making money. It was about having the catanet we wanted.
Virtually all the growth on the Internet since has been about various companies posturing to make money at all levels. Governments, and Businesses, and Individuals have all been feeding at the Internet trough now since about 1991 when appropriate use was withdrawn. Most of the posturing is done now and the bid providers have us about where they want us. No matter what we pay, our circuits degrade as fast as the providers can oversell them Unlimited circuits aren't unlimited. The lack of Committed Rate in consumer circuits leads to wide swings in throughput for consumers. I have Comcast Business Internet, but I am on the same coax as my home service neighbors. When they all jump on (torrenting their hearts out no doubt), my business circuit goes to about 10% of what I am supposed to be getting. That is a joke, providing alleged business class services inside a consumer network.
Anyway what I was getting at is that this issue of transition to 6 is almost as old as most of the Internet users. Thirty years ago, adaptation to the IP6 stack was slow because the stack supporting it took almost 1MB of ram. That is certainly not a credible concern today where home machines have gigs of ram. I can only think that we haven't made the transition because someone has a vested interest in delaying the transition. OF course what is unfortunate about that is the the disruption to our society will be extreme if this is not dome smoothy Between the money the government has paid to the big providers, and the massive dollars collected each month from consumers, the money has to exist to make the changes we need to transition. IF not I want to know where that money went?
I think they cannot win this one (Apple that is). There are pods all over the place. For mere money one can be placed on your driveway. I have a number of logic analyzers that have what I call USB pods from which many wires emit. It is clear that iPod means something in particular, and can be protected, but what is next, Suing GOD about the seed pods in plants?
This definitely qualified for what I call, "Special Awe". Normally I save this term to describe the actions of my first wife, who's logic always astounded me, but in this case, I do think we are dealing with SA. Each time SCO does something new in this game, I wonder if they are on drugs. Given that this UNix thingy has been litigated to death. The last I remember, Novell remained the rights-holder. These guys must sit around in coffee shops and see who can come up with the most outlandish claims, then they go do it. I know there are people out there with more money then brains, but even given that, only someone that liked litigation (and being hated) could pick up SCO's banner and charge forward into idiocy. Then again a group of lawyers with not enough to do could buy SCO and litigate in their spare time. At this point it seems to me that Darl's name is becoming an adjective. "He really did a Darl on that one!!".:-)
Your words resound in my mind strongly. I do have a bitter feeling that my new "favorite" platform (mac) has a weird-ass development language. The objective C did not click for me when I tried it. I love the Mac GUI, but I am really happy the command line sits a click away, with GNU tools handy. I can write C or C++ in a standard Unix environment.
I have a Mac Pro as my workstation, and I am very happy with that. I still have to keep a Windows machine for those several turnkey apps I need to run under five percent of the time. I have an iPhone 4 and love it, but I am not an iPhone developer. I looked into it and could not abide the idea that I could conceive, design, and write an application, then roll the dice as to whether the App Store would accept it. I don't like to write programs in non-transportable languages. In a way, I feel we are still back at the point of the Unix Wars. We have competing platforms and a severe lack of portability because several vendors think customers are controlled more by lock--in than by platform quality.
What I would like to see is windows and Mac OS, and the iPhone and other phones, all use the same multi-source languages and interfaces, then let the customers choose on the value of the hardware quality, OS quality, and documentation quality. The users are blown around like leaves in the wind by the market forces. What Microsoft wants, what Apple wants. We could really use a clearly superior platform for development. One that inspires us to develop, with confidence that APIs will remain stable for a window of opportunity of several years, or even "five years" so it can be depreciated by business properly.
I have been moving towards embedded computing because the marketplace is littered with the dead bodies of companies that were embraced, extended, and extinguished.
I feel like an artist that wants to create a masterpiece, but I am unable to choose a canvas I think will last over time. I thought the Sony PS3 might be fun, but look what has happened to that. I am waiting to see the light at the end of the tunnel and don't know if I can last long enough to pass through this non-sense.
It would be interesting if the Kindle got a high def color screen at a subsidized price because advertisers wanted their ads in color. The free cellular link is a great feature. The day that goes away, the Kindle really is dead though, well mostly. I guess you could hook it up to your Mac via cable and purchase/download via the web instead, but it is not as sexy. Maybe kiddy-porn, I mean kindle-porn would push the color screen faster.
Slashdot Mirror
San Francisco is a major tourist attraction, there is no doubt. The toll booths are just another way of getting more money from the tourists. But there is another aspect to this. Lots of people want to live in moron county, and commute to SF or even to Silicon Valley. I don't know what the toll is these days. I do remember once it was $3. Lets see 5 days a week, four weeks a year, that $60 a month. As if gas wasn't enough of an expense for the hardworking locals, with the strained economy, a $60/month additional expense just worsens the pain. And add to that the cost of parking in the city. Now employers in San Francisco have to pay their employee more to offset the travel, toll, and parking fees. That doesn't make SF as attractive a place to have a business. Having lived and operated a business in SF before, a remember vividly commuting from the North Bay, over the bridge, and working my way to Noe Valley to do my days work. Eventually I just burned out on the commute and started working from home in Tiberon. The company grew and relocated to South San Francisco because business locations were prohibitively expensive in SF, on top of everything else. The lack of a BART transit from the North-West Bay to the City causes massive commuting by automobile. Ride sharing helps, but it is still a glut of cars doing the daily transit, and the time wasted at the slow toll area is just more overhead time the employee has to tolerate for the sake of being employed.
IMHOTEP...IMHOTEP...IMHOTEP
I live in Santa Maria which, while not a huge city, has quite a few people who live around town. I have a home in a subdivision, and I know there is a pop at the entrance several hundred yards away. Every year or so, I check to see where DSL speed is, and I always get the same answer. Verizon wants $39 per month for a 1.5Mb/sec DSL. I am using Comcast cable high speed internet (so called business service). I had to sign up for their business service to get any fixed IP numbers. Speakeasy Speedtest says I am getting 25.28Mbps downward, and 4.88 Mbps upward. The problem I have is that I am getting my so called "business class internet" over the same cable is the home cable TV users in my subdivision. At peak usage times, my downward can get as low as 2Mbps, when the neighbors are torrenting I suspect. I have about one outage a month, usually lasting eight hours or longer. Every several months I have a complete failure, and I discover that a technician unplugged my cable at the nearby box, because I don't have video service any more, and he doesn't know I have business internet. Recently my downward dropped to modem speeds, and a technical came out and discovered that the previous technician that accessed the local box, put a video filter on my line backwards, again to make sure I am not trying to get video. I pay slightly over one hundred dollars a month for this service, and I had to sign for a three year contract to get the fixed IP's at all. They wouldn't slave the reverse DNS to my server either, something every previous internet service provider had done for me. Although I am on the central coast just north of Santa Barbara, my packets hit the Internet somewhere around Livermore, east of Oakland in the Bay Area. There is no Verizon Fios in my subdivision. And the copper phone lines here are so bad, you are lucky to get a stable 28Kb connection with a quality modem. When my contract is up, I am going to stop paying over a hundred a month. I won't have a fixed IP any more,, but with the poop uptime numbers I get with Comcast, I can't try to operate any serious server based services out of my location. Although this is a so called business class connection I have, there are no committed rates available t me from Comcast at any cost. Getting a T1 in here would probably require me to pay for a quarter mile trench, the cost of which would probably exceed my equity in my home. So I have enjoyed to connection most of the time, as a casual user, but any ideas I had about using it for business went up in smoke when I discovered how unreliable the service was. I can't guarantee my Internet based services to my clients, depending on Comcast business service as my provider.
We could call it prescient memory, and it could recall data from the future as well as the past. You wouldn't even have to write the data into it, or give it the address of the data you want because it knows what you want before you ask.
I was reading the technical specs on the Z80 recently, and the Zilog designers were brilliant in their CPU design which automatically refreshed the dynamic ram by using a self incrementing "R" register to traverse enough addresses to do the full refresh. That was back in the late 70's and 80's, and that more or less the same dynamic ram is with us still. We could use some advances in that area. It seems like we are struggling to find the elegant memory solution. When I started with computers, we were writing into a core to sense it's state then having to write the information back. That was clever, but inefficient. Now we have dynamic memory that wants to go to sleep, and we have to nudge it regularly to keep it awake. I hope in my lifetime we finally see a memory technology that is actually straightforward and elegant.
The so-called "over-priced computers with intel processors" are staying viable and lasting years longer than the PC's I have bought. Apple sells well designed and supported hardware that has excellent quality control when it comes to the OS working well on the hardware. When I bought my 8-core 3.0GHz Xeon Mac Pro, it cost more than a clone, but then again the 3.0GHz Xeon CPUs were only being shipped by Intel to Apple, and I got extra performance for my extra money. Also my three year old Mac Pro is running very well, compared to any three year old Windows machines I purchased from other vendors. Non-apple machines running Windows 7 run like crap, and when you buy a machine with Windows 7 Home Pro, it doesn't take long to discover you have to buy an upgrade to get the XP emulator so you can run all you legacy software. If you haven't used a Mac day after day, and experienced the responsive, solid, Mac OS performance, are you really qualified to say their machines are overpriced?
If you eliminated Microsoft from history, Digital Research would have provided CP/M-86 for the PC and their operating systems were not open source. However Gary Kildall was significantly more benevolent than Bill Gates IMHO. CP/M, then Concurrent w/Gem would have gone down the GUI route. The thing about DRI though was that they didn't pile on new software on top of old. They re-engineered their operating systems, and they were lean and mean.
The author of netware was rightly proud of the fact that there were only a few hundred machine instructions between the wire and the disk. For a few years after Microsoft tried to enter the network server arena, their Lan Manager was considered a joke in comparison to NetWare. IMHO the reason MS overtook NetWare subsequently had to do with marketing muscle more than technical merits.
When the RAID manufacturer INFORTREND wanted their Santa Rosa office on the Internet. I got them to sign up for a frame relay with Sonic.Net. Then I installed a FreeBSD system that ran email and web and DNS flawlessly for years. I got Samba running and integration with their Windows 200 Pro workstations. I did whatever it took to keep their domain alive, and when their frame relay went down, I re-hosted their WEB and MAIL, and because I was the secondary, their clients still had FTP support. I had (what I thought was) a great relationship with the Tech Support Manager whom I reported to. Eventually the chinese mother company get a new CIO in silicon valley who mandated Microsoft for DNS, WEB, and Exchange for email. When asked to roll out all this crap, I refused for various reasons. They fired me, the Tech Support Manager accused me of letting him down and of bad faith. All that "good faith" I thought I had built up over four or so years of great service was vaporized in an instant when Microsoft reared it's ugly head in their enterprise. The manager whom I had thought was one of my best friends, I guess was forced to drink the coolaid by his company. What a waste of my devotion to a client. Oh I felt good about my performance, but both of us felt betrayed, and for what?
Use the drum spin as timing, are we talking bendix G15 here?
I have worked in all sorts of situations. In some, the environment was so stimulating I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning, and sad when the day was over. Most software people I know have gone through the same process. Young people go to work for older people, work on handshake, verbal promises, no written specification, with a schedule written by someone who is clueless about how long things take. Ego powers them through a project or two, but don't realize several things... Youthful energy doesn't last forever, good health doesn't last forever, business people often tell you whatever you want to hear to keep things going. This sort of behavior can get a startup going, until the hammer drops. The IRS comes through and you find out the employer who said he was paying you under the table has 1099'd you and you owe big bucks. The company incorporates, and the new accountant tells your boss you can't be paid under the table. The boss tells you accounting says you are what's called an exempt employee and cannot be paid overtime. Eventually you get a little smarter and you ask for a royalty, but the boss is still one step ahead of you and you accept a percentage of the net, not the gross, but you don't get to say anything about expense control, and since the boss is driving a mercedes and always flies first class and always seems to have plenty of coke, there is never any profits, and your royalty isn't worth sniffing at. Then you get smarter and you ask for stock. The boss agrees, but doesn't tell you there are different kinds. You are thrilled to get 10,000 shares but don't realize those are non-voting shares and the boss has fifty million shares. When the company needs some money, they issue another hundred million shares to sell to clueless investors, and your 10,000 shares get diluted out from under you, and you don't find out until later. Eventually vesting times come and you have to fork up money to buy the shares at promised option price. Soon afterward they issue more stock and the actual value of your stock becomes a fraction of what you paid. Then they need a marketing VP, and he wants 10 million shares also, then the CEO, he get 40 million. Then the boss feels he needs to hire ten more people, and then they need to move into bigger digs. The boss discovers it's not what you own, but what you have the use of, so he leases a rolls (he needs it to impress potential clients). Meanwhile you are working on a 286-16 and the salesman is carrying a state of the art pentium notebook, and he gets a leased car too. The boss declines to buy you that $200 software toolkit that would make your job easier because accounting says he needs to watch expenses. Then they need to drop $40,000 on a set of magazine ads, a full page each week for 20 weeks in PC Magazine. The boss tells you he has to wait a couple of days to issue checks because they are waiting on cash flow. Then a few days later, you go to work, and the place is closed. you can't even get to the computer you brought from home to use for work because they couldn't afford to get you one, and it takes a while for you to wrangle it away from the creditors who want to liquidate any assets in sight to get some of their money back. This scenario is not just some story... It happens every day in silicon valley, and berkeley, and anytown, USA. It only takes a few of these experiences and you start to learn more about contracts, what you will and won't do for money, or promises of money, and to "Get it in Writing".
When the Darwin awards happen, internet usage and mail usage spike, big time.
I remember that. In 1972, ARPA net users were asked not to play chess on MIT-DMCG in the daytime. Those were the days of the 2400 baud leased lines. Things are obviously different now :-)
That would depend on whether the improvement was in the link between the local pop and the CO, or whether the last mile got better. Over time the speed that fiber transducers can handle increases, and there is a long way to go yet before we can say we have hit the speed limit on the fiber. Where I live, the copper is so bad the DSL cannot even run reliably at 3Mb downward, and I refuse to pay $39/mo for 1.5Mb DSL. My cable internet is generally running at 16+Mb/sec downward and 4Mb upward. I think what is going on is that they put better coax in between my home and the pop at the edge of my subdivision, and it is probably fiber from there onward. But my business internet service is running off the same cable as my neighbors residential service, and when they start running torrent 24x7, my service degrades terribly. Why? Because even though I have a "business internet service", there is no committed information rate for me, and while things are usually good, I cannot count on the service from day to day. What good are my fixed IP numbers, if I cannot rely on the service to perform on any day, or at any bitrate? I was having trouble with my throughput recently, and a tech came out and found my problem was that a Comcast worker had come out and placed a filter on my feed to prevent any possibility of me receiving unauthorized video. But they put the filter in backwards, and it mucked up my internet for weeks.
It is not about data particularly, but phone minutes. A few years ago I was having some financial problems and I had some creditors calling me constantly on my cell phone trying to collect. When I saw I as approaching my limit, I shut off the phone for the rest of the month. Then I received a bill for hundreds of dollars in overages because the provider was charging me air time while callers were leaving voicemail. I called the provider and asked what I could do to prevent this, and all they could recommend was closing my account, which of course would cause a $175 early termination fee. I found a new provider after that, although one is very much like another, as we all know.
Now having decided not to use plasma based power systems, Tokyo is again on the verge of another round of massive destruction. I have been studying this, and I am fairly sure that these new supercomputers will emit electromagnetic frequencies that will attract Godzilla, and perhaps other dangerous monsters currently at rest. We would have to ask the twin fairies to be sure, but I think this is a dire threat to Shibuya, and surrounding areas. Having lived there, I would hate to see it destroyed again.
Oh the idea is elegant, I give Anthony that. But the only entity I can trust is the LORD GOD and if we could get him to sign certificates (root@universe.org), then we could really have a chain of trust. Another part of what is going wrong is the IPV4 system, whose shortage of addresses gives ICANN the power to charge big bucks for IP allocations, and to make policy about how addresses are granted, and to whom. I don't have a workable better idea, but hanging the IP's and domains off the CA's (commercial assholes) bothers me.
I believe the question of what shall become of the Internet is very important. I would be fascinated though to hear what possible justification there could be for letting WOZ sit on it. The class of people that should be thinking about this issue are people like the folks that designed the Internet to begin with, BBN. Perhaps some representatives from Anti-virus companies to explain Internet pollution. The fellow that did most of the work on DNS. Some people from the telecoms that understand the growth factors. Having invented the cheapest floppy controller does not make one an expert on the Internet. Marshall Rose would be a good candidate because he foresaw decades ago the need to transition into IP V6.
I have been writing programs lately on my computer. I has an old CPU, and what would be considered a small HD. OK the CPU is 386/20 and the HD is 20MB. This might sound small but it is not so bad when your language tools fit on one floppy. IMHO it is MS and Windows that have driven our space sensibilities mad. OK multimedia needs space, but that was what optical media was for. The point I was trying to make is that we were able to do a lot of great stuff with one thousandth of the space. 640K of ram was a lot when you were writing in assembler, and 40MB of HD was quite a bit for casual use. These days, it's, "I want one thousand billion bytes of storage on my computer, or I feel deprived" Just how much storage do you need in your hand? Can't you shift some of it to your house server, or your provider's server, or some higher level server. Just because you can doesn't mean it's a good idea to carry the library of congress in your phone. Massive portable data storage has led to massive data compromises. Oh well my humble opinion.
Then we have Intel building security into their processors, and Microsoft decides not to use it. A while later Microsoft and Intel decide native code writers cannot be trusted and provide system-wide controls to keep "non-managed code" from running.
Computers being certified to be free of malware is like hookers being certified to be free of STDs. The certification is good for a few minutes, and then you are back to square one.
The healthiest thing we could do for the Internet would be to ban all Windows machines until Microsoft can prove that their operating systems are robust enough to survive on the Internet. If Microsoft operating systems need anti-virus enhancements, I think Microsoft should pay for that. After several years of paying for Symantec, the anti-virus software has costed more than the computer did to begin with.
And of course what makes this even more scary is Microsoft's demonstrated ability to wag around the US Government and get whatever they want. The decision to store public data in a proprietary format continues to astound me.
And others here have mentioned the fact that a company that cannot produce a secure operating system should not be trusted to judge the health of anyone else's systems.
Virtually all the growth on the Internet since has been about various companies posturing to make money at all levels. Governments, and Businesses, and Individuals have all been feeding at the Internet trough now since about 1991 when appropriate use was withdrawn. Most of the posturing is done now and the bid providers have us about where they want us. No matter what we pay, our circuits degrade as fast as the providers can oversell them Unlimited circuits aren't unlimited. The lack of Committed Rate in consumer circuits leads to wide swings in throughput for consumers. I have Comcast Business Internet, but I am on the same coax as my home service neighbors. When they all jump on (torrenting their hearts out no doubt), my business circuit goes to about 10% of what I am supposed to be getting. That is a joke, providing alleged business class services inside a consumer network.
Anyway what I was getting at is that this issue of transition to 6 is almost as old as most of the Internet users. Thirty years ago, adaptation to the IP6 stack was slow because the stack supporting it took almost 1MB of ram. That is certainly not a credible concern today where home machines have gigs of ram. I can only think that we haven't made the transition because someone has a vested interest in delaying the transition. OF course what is unfortunate about that is the the disruption to our society will be extreme if this is not dome smoothy Between the money the government has paid to the big providers, and the massive dollars collected each month from consumers, the money has to exist to make the changes we need to transition. IF not I want to know where that money went?
I think they cannot win this one (Apple that is). There are pods all over the place. For mere money one can be placed on your driveway. I have a number of logic analyzers that have what I call USB pods from which many wires emit. It is clear that iPod means something in particular, and can be protected, but what is next, Suing GOD about the seed pods in plants?
This definitely qualified for what I call, "Special Awe". Normally I save this term to describe the actions of my first wife, who's logic always astounded me, but in this case, I do think we are dealing with SA. Each time SCO does something new in this game, I wonder if they are on drugs. Given that this UNix thingy has been litigated to death. The last I remember, Novell remained the rights-holder. These guys must sit around in coffee shops and see who can come up with the most outlandish claims, then they go do it. I know there are people out there with more money then brains, but even given that, only someone that liked litigation (and being hated) could pick up SCO's banner and charge forward into idiocy. Then again a group of lawyers with not enough to do could buy SCO and litigate in their spare time. At this point it seems to me that Darl's name is becoming an adjective. "He really did a Darl on that one!!". :-)
I have a Mac Pro as my workstation, and I am very happy with that. I still have to keep a Windows machine for those several turnkey apps I need to run under five percent of the time. I have an iPhone 4 and love it, but I am not an iPhone developer. I looked into it and could not abide the idea that I could conceive, design, and write an application, then roll the dice as to whether the App Store would accept it. I don't like to write programs in non-transportable languages. In a way, I feel we are still back at the point of the Unix Wars. We have competing platforms and a severe lack of portability because several vendors think customers are controlled more by lock--in than by platform quality.
What I would like to see is windows and Mac OS, and the iPhone and other phones, all use the same multi-source languages and interfaces, then let the customers choose on the value of the hardware quality, OS quality, and documentation quality. The users are blown around like leaves in the wind by the market forces. What Microsoft wants, what Apple wants. We could really use a clearly superior platform for development. One that inspires us to develop, with confidence that APIs will remain stable for a window of opportunity of several years, or even "five years" so it can be depreciated by business properly.
I have been moving towards embedded computing because the marketplace is littered with the dead bodies of companies that were embraced, extended, and extinguished.
I feel like an artist that wants to create a masterpiece, but I am unable to choose a canvas I think will last over time. I thought the Sony PS3 might be fun, but look what has happened to that. I am waiting to see the light at the end of the tunnel and don't know if I can last long enough to pass through this non-sense.
It would be interesting if the Kindle got a high def color screen at a subsidized price because advertisers wanted their ads in color. The free cellular link is a great feature. The day that goes away, the Kindle really is dead though, well mostly. I guess you could hook it up to your Mac via cable and purchase/download via the web instead, but it is not as sexy. Maybe kiddy-porn, I mean kindle-porn would push the color screen faster.