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John Robb writes about the normalisation of salaries that is driven by the use of the Internet and global corporations [1]. He cites an example of IBM forcing many of it’s employees to work in developing countries for lower wages.
It seems to me that IBM is leading the field in this regard and many other companies will do the same. The computer industry which has been very well paid for the last 20 years seems likely to have some significant reductions in wages. Some computer jobs can’t be immediately outsourced to other companies such as network cabling, hardware repair, and training. But they will experience a pay reduction due to competition from software engineers and other people who’s primary work is easily outsourced.
For a job hunter it seems that the best thing to do is to look for work that requires site visits and customer contact. One of my long-term clients has a large business in installing wireless devices. For a long time they have had an open offer for me to climb up towers and install wireless devices. If the rates for system administration and software engineering in Australia (and the outsourced work from the US that I sometimes do) drops to Indian pay standards then I might do some of that wireless work.
When recommending that my clients hire people to do software engineering or programming work I am considering seeking out people in low-wages countries that I know through the free software community. I believe that through an organisation like Debian I can find people who are as good as the people I have been finding through my local LUG but who can feel happy earning a much lower rate. My clients seem to periodically need PHP work, so if you live in a low wages country, have good PHP skills, and are well known in the free software community to a degree that I can feel happy in skipping personal meetings then you can email me your CV.
Don Marti has written about the Linux vs Windows situation on Netbooks [2]. He suggests that neither Intel nor Microsoft is set up for a Netbook world. If both Intel and Microsoft were to pay the majority of their employees rates that are only slightly greater than typical wages in India then things might look a little better for them.
During the dot-com boom I was working in Europe (firstly in London and then later in Amsterdam). It was a lot of fun in many ways with large amounts of money, easy work, and parties. The down-side was that I had to work with druggies and other people who were not suitable employees as the companies I worked for felt that they had no choice. Since the dot-com crash the quality of the people I have worked with has increased significantly which was a good compensation for the lower pay. Also I believe that the lack of silly money was one factor that helped Linux and other free software increase market share after the crash. I expect that the economic depression that we are now entering will have a similar effect. I will earn less money, have fewer parties, and work harder. But generally the quality of the staff in the IT industry will improve and the usage of free software will increase.
As an aside, Don suggests that people who create web sites etc will want more expensive machines. I regularly use my EeePC for running servers in several data centers, I do all types of system administration and system programming on it. The screen resolution is not that great, but it shouldn’t be difficult to design a Netbook that can drive a 1920*1200 external display (as is being commonly deployed in new hotel rooms – it seems that all new large-screen TVs have VGA and DVI input). A netbook which can drive a 1920*1200 display and a full-size USB keyboard could allow me to do some very effective work in a hotel room while also allowing me to work when traveling in public transport. Now all I need is for the hotel booking sites such as www.wotif.com to allow me to search for rooms that have such a display. A business hotel could even provide a USB keyboard in the room to allow guests to travel light. Of course it would be possible to design a slightly larger laptop at a Netbook price point, the extra plastic and metal needed to make a larger frame and keyboard costs almost nothing and given the low prices of large desktop TFT displays I find it difficult to believe that the factor of two difference in price between the cheaper and more expensive Netbooks is due to the display.
My main machine is a Thinkpad T41p, I really don’t need a high-end machine on my desktop. I am considering the practice of avoiding purchasing expensive machines as a matter of principle. Maybe if we try and avoid buying expensive machines we can help drive the market towards Netbooks where Linux has an advantage.
I’ve been working on a redundant wireless network for a client. The network has two sites that have pairs of links (primary and backup) which have dedicated wireless hardware (not 802.11 and some proprietary controller in the device – it’s not an interface for a Linux box).
When I first started work the devices were configured in a fully bridged mode, so I decided to use Linux Bridging (with brctl) to bridge an Ethernet port connected to the LAN with only one of the two wireless devices. The remote end had a Linux box that would bridge both the wireless devices at it’s end (there were four separate end-points as the primary and backup links were entirely independent). This meant of course that packets would go over the active link and then return via the inactive link, but needless data transfer on the unused link didn’t cause any problems.
The wireless devices claimed to implement bridging but didn’t implement STP (Spanning Tree Protocol) and they munged every packet to have the MAC address of the wireless device (unlike a Linux bridge which preserves the MAC address). The lack of STP meant that the devices couldn’t be connected at both ends. They also only forwarded IP packets so I couldn’t use STP implementations in Linux hosts or switches to prevent loops.
Below (in the part of this post which shouldn’t be in the RSS feed) I have included the script I wrote to manage a failover bridge. It pings the router at the other end when the primary link is in use, if it can’t reach it then it removes the Ethernet device that corresponds to the primary link and adds the device related to the secondary link. I had an hourly cron job that would flip it back to the primary link if it was on the secondary.
I ended up not using this in production because there were other some routers on the network which couldn’t cope with a MAC address changing and needed a reboot after such changes (even waiting 15 minutes didn’t result in the new MAC being reliably detected). So I’m posting it here for the benefit of anyone who is interested.
Continue reading Bridging and Redundancy
Paul Wayper has said that he only wants to work for companies that will send him too LCA [1]. While that criteria is quite reasonable it seems overly specific. Among other things the varying location of LCA will result in the expense for the employer varying slightly year by year – which employers generally don’t like.
I believe that a better option is to have an employment package that specifies a certain amount of money (related to the gross income of the employee) should be set aside for training, hardware, or other expenses that help the employee (or their colleagues) do their job. Such an option would probably only be available to senior employees who are most able to determine the most effective way of spending the money.
For example an employee who earns $100,000 per annum might be permitted to assign 10% of their income ($10,000) to training or hardware that assists their job. Modern PCs are so cheap that any reasonable hardware requirements could fit within that budget with ease.
There are several benefits to such a scheme. On many occasions I have had colleagues who had inadequate hardware to do their work, slow PCs with small screens really impacted their productivity, in such situations buying a $400 PC and a $400 monitor for each person in the team could make a significant direct improvement to productivity before the impact on moralle kicked in!
Some years ago Lenovo ran some adverts for Thinkpads which said “demand one at the interview”. That made sense when a Thinkpad was an expensive piece of hardware. While there are still some expensive Thinkpads, there is a good range of cheap models, two which cost less than $1200AU and another eight which cost between $1200 and $1800. Now it makes more sense to allow each employee to choose their own hardware (both desktop and portable) and not even bother about issues such as whether the IT department blesses them. As Tom Limoncelli suggested in his LCA keynote, users are going to take more control over their environment whether the IT department like it or not, so it’s best to work with them rather than fighting them.
For training a common problem is that management can’t correctly determine which conferences are worthy of the expense of sending their technical staff. Then when a conference is selected they send everyone. It seems to me that when there are a number of conferences in a region (EG AUUG, LCA, OSDC, and SAGE-AU in Australia) there is a benefit in having someone from your team attend each one. Planning at the start of the year which conferences will be attended by each team member is something that appears to be beyond the ability of most managers as it requires knowing the technical interests and skill areas of most staff. If each employee was granted one week of paid time per year to attend conferences and they could determine their own budget allocation then they would be able to work it out themselves in a more effective manner.
Stewart has made some predictions for the future of computing [1].
He predicts that within 2 years the majority of consumer machines will be laptops and have SSD (not rotational media). I predict that by the end of next year more than half of all new consumer machines that are being sold will be laptops (defined as being portable machines with the display and keyboard forming part of a single unit), and that more than half of such machines will have SSD as the primary storage (IE used for booting and for most common file access). I predict that by the end of 2010 the majority of all computers shipped (in all form factors including games consoles and servers) will have SSD as their primary storage. I predict that in late 2010 rotational media will start to go away for most tasks, but for at least the next year the model will be SSD for small/light/fast operations and rotational media for large capacity. I’m not disagreeing with Stewart, just being more precise. Also while Val made some good points about the reliability of SSD [2] I don’t think that this will be an obstacle in the low-end of the market. There is no little evidence of computers failing in the consumer market due to being unreliable – it seems that Microsoft has conditioned people to expect unreliability.
I predict that Sun will not release ZFS under the GPL in time for anyone to care. The release of OpenSolaris was way behind schedule and I don’t expect anything different this time around.
Stewart predicts that in five years Linux will have significantly more desktop market share than Apple. I agree and also predict that Apple will convert to the Linux kernel. I predict that Apple will become the first Linux distributor to make any significant hardware sales for the mainstream computer market (Linux bundled with hardware has already done well for mobile phones, routers, Tivo, and similar devices where the user doesn’t know what OS is running).
I predict the death of Windows mobile. I predict that in five years the mobile phone/PDA market will be dominated by Android with a variety of other Linux based phones. I predict that some time after five years the iPhone will go away.
Chris Samuel has made some predictions too [3]. He predicts that within two years “The distinction between laptops, netbooks and mobile phones will get even more blurred with consumers demanding mobiles with more power and lighter and lighter laptops/netbooks”. I believe that the difference between laptops, netbooks, and mobile phones is primarily one of IO (size of keyboard, sockets for peripherals, and size of screen). For desktop use the only application I use which requires more RAM or CPU power than my EeePC 701 can provide is Firefox. A combination of more efficient javascript interpretation and better coding practices by web designers would solve that problem. A significant portion of the mass of a laptop is dedicated to suppporting IO ports and maintaining the structural integrity of the device. A common feature in science fiction is lapotops that can be rolled up, stretched to size, etc (the Thinkpad Butterfly keyboard was an attempt at a first step towards this which failed due to issues of mechanical strength).
As some Netbook class systems already have 3G networking built in it seems a logical extension to have telephony functions built in to a laptop. I predict that laptops with full telephony support will go on sale in 2010.
One promising feature in regard to laptop IO is the new Display Port [4] video port. It will only be an incremental improvement to the space taken for IO capacity, but I am not expecting anything revolutionary in the near future. I predict that HDMI will be a failure in the market and DVI will never gain critical market share, it will be VGA and Display Port on most systems by 2012.
Predicting that technological developments won’t happen is always risky, but I predict that the mechanical issues which separate the heavier laptops and desktop-replacements from netbooks (in terms of making a large display and keyboard that won’t break frequently) won’t be solved within five years. In the same note, I don’t expect anyone to try building a mobile phone which can have a full-size screen and keyboard connected to it (although it would be possible to do so). So I expect that the phone/PDA, Netbook, and laptop distinction will remain for at least the next 5 years.
One thing that would make sense is to have a small device (PDA or mobile phone) store data that is security relevant and connect it to full-size machines for serious work. So for example you could use a desktop machine for Internet banking (maybe in an Internet cafe) and have your mobile phone ask you to confirm the transaction and then authenticate you to the bank server. I predict a larger role for PDAs and mobile phones as computers as soon as people start to take security seriously. I won’t try and guess when that might be, but I predict that it won’t be for at least five years.
I predict that increasing oil prices will significantly make a significant impact on the price of computers before the end of 2010. Not that I expect the prices to suddenly jump upwards, it’s more likely that prices will steadily increase while at the same time new technology to reduce production expenses in other areas is introduced.
I also predict that increasing oil prices will increase the desire to maintain systems for longer periods of time without maintenance. For example my Thinkpad T41p has had a few significant part replacements (a couple of motherboards, half the case, and a few keyboard replacements). This is OK while plastic costs almost nothing and the manufacturing expenses are also very low. But in future I expect that people will want laptops that can run for years without needing part replacments and which have a service life of 10 years or more. This requirement for strength will counteract the demand for laptops that are as light as netbooks.
There is currently a lot of discussion about how to protect “marriage“, such discussion is based on the issue of whether Gay Marriage should be prohibited to protect Straight Marriage. Some straight people believe that their own marriage would be better if homosexuals were allowed to get married, some have even declared that they won’t get married until discrimination in this regard is ended. I don’t believe that whether some other people get married will make any difference to my marriage.
I believe that any two consenting adults who are not closely related should be allowed to get married, but I am not going to write about that today. What I will address is some positive steps that can be taken by a government to protect Straight Marriage without regard to Gay Marriage.
By the most objective criteria, death is the greatest obstacle to marriage. To protect someone’s marriage you should first protect them from becoming a widow or widower for as long as possible. Also protecting the lives of children (both biological and adopted) is important for protecting marriage. Here are some of the many ways of preventing needless death:
- Don’t start wars except in the most extreme situations. Wars inevitably involve the death of soldiers (some of whom are married) and any war that is anything other than the smallest border incident will involve the death of civilians (married people and children).
- Protect the food supply and the environment. When toxic chemicals, heavy metals, or radioactive material are released in the environment it results in a statistical increase in the death rate from cancer.
- Increase the funding for medical research. Today there are many medical situations which can be routinely and safely resolved which would have been likely to be fatal 10 or 20 years ago. More medical research will lead to more diseases being cured.
- Spread positive technology around the world. Protecting marriage should have a larger scope than your local region, therefore life-saving medicine needs to be affordable in all countries. Patents that prevent this need to be voided in the poorer regions of the world.
- Increase the research on car safety. Car crashes are one of the largest causes of death and significant injury in the first world which can be easily reduced. Unfortunately there has been little research on making cars safe for women and children (crash-test dummies for woman and children are to a large extent scaled-down models based on research on men due to the lack of female and child cadavers for research [1]). Also I believe that the majority of car safety research in regard to crash test dummies was done in the US and therefore is biased towards caucasians and afro-americans – I believe that research on other races is needed to give equal protection to all races (caucasian and afro-american races are in a minority in the world).
This is by no means a comprehensive list, but it does cover some issues that are current and well known.
Now the next objective way to analyse this issue is to look at statistics related to divorce. It seems that money is an issue related to divorce and therefore protecting the finances of married people is a way of protecting marriage.
The first thing that can be done is to give people more continuity of employment. Being in a situation where you could lose your job at short notice is stressful and has to have a negative impact on a married couple. Recently the supposedly “conservative” Liberal government in Australia was trying to ban Gay Marriage while also introducing legislation to make it easier to lay off employees who have done nothing wrong (based on business issues). Among other things the Work Choices legislation made it more difficult for such employees to take out bank loans (which means that they often pay higher interest rates).
A final issue that causes stress for married couples is the school system (which is broken in many ways). I’m not going to try and cover this in detail here, but I will note that installing flag-poles (as the Liberal government wanted to do) is not the solution to problems with the education system.
Addressing these real issues will take some government funding, but it’s not a lot and a much greater amount of money could be saved by ending the “war on drugs”.
If the people who claim to be protecting straight marriage can address these other more serious problems that threaten straight marriages then I still won’t agree with calls to ban gay marriage. But it would make then seem less hypocritical.
Recently there has been increasing attention paid to thermal issues. The power used by computers not only impacts the electricity bill (and battery life for a portable device) but is a cooling problem. The waste heat from desktop systems and servers costs energy (and therefore money) to remove by the air-conditioning system and the heat produced by small devices can impact where they may be used.
It seems that a temperature of 40C can cause burns if applied to the human body for any period of time. As it doesn’t immediately hurt this can happen without people noticing. A friend recently reported getting a large blister on his arm after drinking a moderate amount of alcohol and falling asleep next to his EeePC.
I have noticed that my EeePC 701 has an unpleasant pattern of heat dissipation. It appears to use only one small vent in the side to vent most of the heat (with some vents in the base for air intake) and the base is all plastic. Apparently such a machine draws 14W from the wall when in active use compared to my measurements of 20W for a Thinkpad T41p. The Thinkpad however has a significantly greater size, this means bigger vents (and therefore lower temperatures of the vented air). Also the fan inside the Thinkpad makes much less noise so I guess it’s larger.
If I am working in the lounge and leave my Thinkpad on the couch it doesn’t seem to have any thermal issues. But if I leave my EeePC sitting in a normal manner the vents on the base are partially blocked and it becomes unpleasantly hot. If I leave my EeePC upside-down with the lid closed (so that the vents in the base are exposed to the air) then the screen gets very hot, I am not sure whether this is heat from the CPU going through the keyboard to the screen and then being prevented from going further by the insulating cushion or whether heat is generated in the screen (although it is supposed to be powered down when the lid is closed).
One suggestion I have received is to place a laptop on a metal baking tray. The flat tray preserves the airflow underneath it and the metal conducts heat reasonably well. Baking trays seem to be made of aluminium or thin steel, they don’t conduct heat well – but a lot better than a cushion.
It seems to me that one factor which will limit the development of NetBook class machines is the ratio of heat dissipation to either area or volume (I’m not sure which is more important). For use similar to mine providing the same compute power as an EeePC 701 with less heat dissipation would be ideal – and technically should not be difficult to achieve. Unfortunately I think that people will want to run Windows on NetBook class machines so we will see the development of machines with faster CPUs and GPUs which have worse ratios of heat to heat dissipation potential which will lead to more heat induced shutdowns and low temperature burns.
It’s a pity that no-one makes a netbook with the CPU power of an iPaQ. A 400MHz ARM CPU is all I need for my portable computing and my iPaQs don’t have cooling vents.
Dhanapalan writes about the small number of voters for Linux Australia elections [1]. I guess that blacklist-voting is partly to blame for my inactivity in this regard. Linux Australia is running pretty well so I don’t think there’s a great need for me to go out of my way to vote.
One thing that could be done given that LCA is an LA event is to give a voting session keynote status at LCA. Have it happen just after a keynote speech and have some prize given away to a random person who attends – the free laptops that were given away one year are not required, a free lunch voucher would be more than enough to increase the attendance.
A final factor that needs to be considered is the number of elections that we may vote in. I vote in Australian elections (state and federal), Debian votes (General Resolutions and DPL elections), and sometimes my local LUG. The amount of attention that I can focus on political issues is limited and divided with other elections that are more important.
The Bureau of Meteorology has forecast temperatures of 43, 43, and 35 for today and the next two days. Those temperatures are in celcius. Yesterday was also above 40C so my entire house is hot.
As my airconditioner is not overly large (a smaller unit is more efficient) the back part of my house will get really hot even without extra computers so I’m turning off my SE Linux Play Machine. Also a couple of years ago a SE Linux Play Machine died during summer in a similar situation, and I prefer not to lose hardware.
It will be on again in a few days.
Jennifer 8 Lee gave an interesting TED talk about the spread and evolution of what is called “Chinese food” [1]. In that talk she compares McDonalds to Microsoft and Chinese restaurants to Linux. Her points comparing the different local variations of Chinese food to the variations of Linux make sense.
The CentOS Plus repository has a kernel with support for the XFS filesystem, Postfix with MySQL support, and some other useful things [2].
Mary Gardiner comments about the recent loss of a blog server with all content [3]. One interesting point is that when you start using a service that maintains your data you should consider how to make personal backups in case the server goes away or you decide to stop being a customer.
Val Henson makes some interesting points about the reliability of Solid State Disks (SSD) [4]. Some people are planning to replace RAID arrays of disks with a single SSD with the idea that a SSD will be more reliable, this seems like a bad idea. Also with the risk of corruption it seems that we have a greater need for filesystems that store block checksums.
Lior Kaplan describes how to have multiple Linux bonding devices [5], the comment provides some interesting detail too.
programmableweb.com has a set of links to sites that have APIs which can be used to create mashups [6]. One of the many things I would do if I had a lot more spare time is to play with some of the web APIs that are out there.
Gunnar Wolf has written some insightful comments about the situation in Israel and Palestine [7]. He used to be a Zionist and spent some time living in Israel so he knows more about the topic than most commentators.
Charles Stross has written an informative post about Ubuntu on the EeePC [8]. What is noteworthy about this is not that he’s summarised the issues well, but that he is a well known science-fiction writer and he was responding to a SFWA member. One of his short stories is on my free short stories page [9]. He also wrote Accelerando which is one of the best sci-fi novels I’ve read (and it’s also free) [10].
Don Marti has written about Rent Seeking and proprietary software [11]. It’s an interesting article, nothing really new for anyone who has followed the news about the coal and nuclear industries.
Erik writes about “The Setting Sun” and points out that Scott McNealy had tried to capitalise on the SCO lawsuit but Red Hat has ended up beating them in the market [12].
On Tuesday afternoon I gave a talk on behalf of KaiGai Kohei about SE Linux and the LAPP (Linux Apache, PostgreSQL, PHP/Perl) stack. KaiGai has blogged about this [1], unfortunately Google Translation does a poor job of Japanese and has particular problems with KaiGai’s work (could anyone who knows Japanese and English well please submit some tips to Google). KaiGai’s post is useful for links to his notes which are good background reading.
My talks about SE-LAPP and SE-PostgreSQL have been getting some notice, Bob Edwards referenced SE-PostgreSQL in his talk about database security.
It’s good to see KaiGai’s great work getting the notice that it deserves. I hope that it becomes a standard feature of the PostgreSQL code base in the near future!
Also Casey Schaufler, James Morris, and I have bought KaiGai a present of some Tasmanian wine, in recognition of his great work.
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