flatfish+++ wrote:
> On Sat, 10 Jun 2006 11:39:15 -0700, Rex Ballard wrote:
>
>
> > You provide relevant Pro-Linux information.
> > Your postings are articulate.
> > You provide at least one citation with each article.
> > You make a very solid case for Linux.
>
> Strange that you fail to mention Roy using artwork on his website without
> the author's permission.
I've never seen illegally copied artwork in this newsgroup. Does he
post them in alt.binaries?
Actually, I didn't know that Roy used pirated copyrighted artwork for
which the other has given neither license nor permission. Many artists
publish jpegs or gifs of their works as samples or resumes. Others
Link to the site. I used a professinonally photographed image on my
pages, but the information ballon that pops up gives credit to the
photographer.
No, I don't condone piracy. I don't think someone should have pictures
of Snow White and Alice in Wonderland, taken from Disney Studios and
put them on a site intended to promote kiddie porn. In many cases,
getting permission from an artist or his studio isn't that hard to do.
In many cases, there aren't even royalties.
> That must mean you condone that kind of unethical behavior.
I was unaware of it. I also don't condone piracy of music, movies, or
even software (including Microsoft's). The fines for violation of
copyrights can be a high as 5 years in prison and/or up to $250,000 in
fines per offense. Something to be considered before putting your
favorite cartoon character on your website without asking for
permission.
> I take back what I said about you being an ethical person Rex, obviously
> you are not.
You've read my posts, you know that I do not condone or encourage
anyone to commit such felonies. If you want to use $300/copy software
on your computer, then you should pay what the author requests, or
negotiate a better deal. Stealing or pirating copies of Windows,
famous images, or Top-40 music (or even Bottom 100) without getting
appropriate permissions is a felony.
Roy, I suggest that you make the appropriate arrangements with the
author, studio, or publisher you got that artwork from, or remove it
from your site. Just to easy to end up in "club fed" - the case is WAY
to easy to prove.
> > Google search comp.os.linux.advocacy and search for Rex Ballard.
> > You know you are in good company.
>
> I mean let's be honest, you seem to have been at the very conception of
> personal computing, involved in every facet short of inventing the
> Internet ( That honor belongs to Al Gore).
Not quite. Yes, I have been in the IT industry for almost 30 years (I
built my first computer in 1977). I've been using Unix since 1982 -
almost 24 years. I've been using the Internet since 1984 (CCI was one
of the first 100 corporate usenet hosts).
In 1991, I created a project at Landmark Education in the Self
Expression and Leadership program in which I wanted a few volunteers to
help me create some shareware which would allow Windows users to access
the Internet. I was working at SoftTronics at the time, and I thought
it would be an easy game to play and maybe win.
When the original group didn't manifest, I started communicating via
BBS systems, usenet newsgroups, and one-on-one conversations
face-to-face and via telehpone. I had a coach, who suggested that I
take on having at least 5 enrollment conversations per day. I was in a
course with 25 other people, one of those people was the director of
frame relay sales for MCI. I was sharing the possibility of having
TCP/IP access to other computers, including other companies and the
National Science Foundation Network, and he freaked out. He met with
me for about 4 hours after class.
Keep in mind that the "Internet" in 1991 was a government funded
network. It was actually the National Science Foundation Network, and
was for "Research and Education Only". Al Gore had pushed for the
funding of that network and was hoping to get dial-up servers to
elementary schools and/or high schools for educational purposes only.
MCI wanted to sell special "Frame Relay Cards" which would plug into
the back of your PC, like a LAN card. They wanted to meter the traffic
charging about 40 cents per megabyte for any e-mail or other content
you might want to send.
I suggested that instead, they just let the corporation use their
corporate TCP/IP based LAN, connect that LAN to a router - I suggested
CISCO because I had just read an article about them the previous week,
and create a frame relay for that router. They could charge something
like $5000 per month for "all you can eat" out of a T1 connection. And
I suggested that it might help clinch the deal if they also offered
connectivity to the government's Research network.
He took that idea to his management, all the way to the CEO, and had it
approved in about a week. Vint Cerf had joined MCI and was at odds
with management, but this unified the company around the TCP/IP over
FrameRelay approach. MCI had bid on the National Science Foundation
traffic, but offered to cut their original bid by 1/3 if they could
subsidize the links with commercial TCP/IP traffic.
Meanwhile, I was able to get a mailing list going on a BBS and a usenet
newsgroup, and I was able to create that team for that terminal
software. In trying to enroll business server administrators to allow
access to information like product catalogues and price books, it
became very clear that they wanted to only grant restricted "read only"
access.
The team looked at the hypertext feature of e-macs and came up with a
"read-only" approach which became known as "Lynx". When I suggested
that it would be really nice to be able to download pictures and
display them in a frame within the text.
When I had a Sun SparcStation I had been using the EZ Editor which
had WYSIWYG editing for UNIX. It was X11 software so I figured it
would be easy to get and modify. The EZ Editor used SGML to store it's
documents.
Another team came up with Opera. It used a subset of SGML which we now
know as HTML. Because the teams were getting bigger, the code was open
sourced, and we all had access to the Internet, things were getting
done with amazing speed. A team at Cornell University Law department
decided that this woud be a great way to browse documents from the Law
library and created Cello.
Knowing that the Internet was about to go commercial, I went to the
East Coast to get some publishers on this new Internet. I took a 6
month contract working for IBM, which gave me time to look for jobs in
the NY/NJ area. I got connected with Dow Jones, and told them I wanted
to put them on the Internet. In January of 1993, they thought I was
out of my mind. One said "Why would ANYONE want to be on the
Internet?". The product manager asked a few more questions, and I
pointed out that at that time, the internet was about 2 million users
(more than Prodigy at the time), and it was growing rapidy, doubling
about once every 6 months (it was actually four months, but I was being
conservative). I asked "If that trend continues, in 2 years you could
have 32 million users. If you could have 10% of those users paying
$10/user/month for content that didn't compete directly with the
"premium service" - and you could do it at a cost of less than five
percent of what it costs you to deliver DowVision now - would that be
an interesting business model?
Greg Gerdy liked it so much he sold Dorothy Palcho (sic) VP of Dow
Jones Information systems.
Keep in mind that by this time I was doing Landmark Education courses
once a week, I was assisting almost every weekend, and getting coaching
on a regular basis. I was having 4-8 enrollment "conversations"
including face-to-face, e-mail, usenet, and telephone, every day. I
had 25 alliance developers who each had teams of 10-20 developers
working on various presentations of DowVision news feed articles to
users on corporate TCP/IP networks.
Some of their customers were major banks, brokerages, insurance
companies, and investment firms. They were leaders, they got the
possibility of the project, and each came up with their own
implementations (many of which are still in use today).
I had heard of WAIS from a magazine article, and saw WAIS on a
Slackware Linux server. I got into an e-mail conversation with the
team at WAIS, who called Greg Gerdy. When Greg asked me if we should
talk to them, I said "Even if you have to pay for their air fare, you
should fly them out here to talk to us here". He did, they came out,
and they gave even better numbers than I did, showed how their WAIS
engine worked, and showed us the Web Browser. I had seen Viola and
Cello, but they showed off Mosaic, which was MUCH better - especially
on Windows 3.1. I also found Trumpet Winsock which was a free
shareware TCP/IP stack. Within 3 months, we had a server hosted by
WAIS, fed by a DowVision feed parsing engine made by Verity (they were
right across the hall in the same building), and we had a Dow Jones web
site in late 1994.
Brewster Kahle, who was an interesting character in his own right, was
going on talk shows, and would mention the Dow Jones site. Our traffic
jumped from a few hundred hits per day to 1,000 hits per hour to 1,000
hits per minute. Eventually we had to get a bigger server, then a
cluster of them.
I had also been invited to participate in an e-mail mailing list. This
was a pretty exclusive group, invitation only. It started with about
40 newspaper publishers in January of 1984, and I became a regular
contributor. As the first group began to grow to over 8000 members, a
second group was formed in March which was exclusively for publishers.
I was invited to that list as well. I would post 2-3 articles each
day, usually 3-5 pages each, which were in the same "follow-up" format
used in this group. This dialogue gave me the opportunity to enroll
other publishers. Before long we had about 8,000 publishers in that
group. Initially, the group was mostly techies who wanted to get
electronic copies of their newspaper in Word format and e-mail it to 1
million AOL subscribers every day. I had more than a few good
arguments for sending just a few headlines and letting the customer go
to their site and "pull" HTML documents from the server. I also
suggested that if they wanted to send their feed content to us, that we
could index it and make it searchable using our DowVision search
engine. We ended up with a whole feed called "Local Newspapers"
dedicated to this bunch. Eventually, robots eliminated the need to go
to Dow Jones and a number of search engines based on the same
technology we used popped up.
In one of these groups, I discussed how one could easily convert a
Wildcat or Fido BBS server into a Linux server and turn it into a
terminal server. They could get one dedicated X.25 line to the MCI
backbone or the next switch (keep in mind Linux supported AX.25 as
early as 1993). We also looked at modifications to the "SLIP" (serial
line internet protocol) which was better optimized for PADs. One
company even offered a TCP/IP stack with "Pink Slip" - eventually most
users opted for PPP. Again, using linux servers, one could get lots of
dial-up lines connected to one faster dedicated line.
McGraw-Hill called me. I don't even know how they got my name
(probably from the mailing list). I just know they wanted to talk to
me about an opportunity. Dow Jones had 5 managers fighting for control
over what would eventually be known as the "Wall Street Journal
Interactive Edition" and most of my Alliance Developers were in
production. I decided to talk to McGraw-Hill. They offered me a job
as director of electronic distribution. One of my jobs was to upgrade
the network links used to send S&P information to the various members
of the financial industry from BSC/3270 to TCP/IP over X.25 or Frame
Relay. Most of the customers just needed a little information and my
buddy at MCI was happy to send me someone who could help. Soon I was
getting these feed customers connected with MCI via TCP/IP over Frame
Relay. Since many of these companies had offices all over the country,
the MCI backbone was getting huge, but other companies like AT&T and
Sprint quickly joined the game. AT&T even came up with ATM, which was
a very high speed transport that could be fed through the "dead space"
in their voice lines.
All this time, I was still in Landmark Education courses, participating
in leadership training programs like the Introduction Leadership
Program (IFLP), the Team Management and Leadership Program (TMLP), the
Team Leader Program, and several seminars and year-long courses. In
each of those courses, I had coaches who know about my project, and
supported me and coached me in generating conversations in which I
could enroll other leaders into a possibility then help them create
opportunities for immediate action.
Needless to say, this had an impact on my income. It went up. A lot.
Unfortunately, because I was working for companies that were monitored
by the Securities Exchange Commission, I couldn't just go out there and
buy hot stock based on my insider information. Which meant that I
couldn't just invest $5,000 in Yahoo when it went public, or $5,000 in
Netscape.
While at McGraw-Hill, I showed the other 179 publication managers how
they could create prototype web servers for around $50,000 including
labor, using Linux, and then upload theri content to the corporate web
UNIX servers. Most of the content was mostly static, and mostly
promotional, but it did get them "online".
I eventually left McGraw-Hill, partly because I had a VP who absolutely
insisted that we had to use Windows NT 3.5 as our corporate Web Server
and that UNIX "had no future" at McGraw-Hill or anywhere else. Shortly
after I left, he was transferred as far away from the Web business as
they could put him. Something about a Windows NT project that was 300%
late, 500% over budget, and was nonfunctional, too slow, and unreliable
when it was "Completed".
I then took on e-commerce. How to buy and sell things on the Internet.
I worked as a consultant in a national practice. One of my clients
was Compaq, and we helped them get their performance up and reach the
point where they could literally take thousands of orders per second
over the web. I can't tell you what they used as a server, but I can
tell you it wasn't Windows and it was a flavor of UNIX.
While I was on the bench for about 3 weeks, I joined Prudential. I
found a job so fast that I ended up becoming a spokesperson for Career
Mosaic for almost 2 years. I was interviewed by the New York Times and
a Photographer took a picture where I ended up looking a bit like Tux.
I was also on CNBC and in Wired Magazine.
At Prudential, I found that they had no problem with getting connected
to the Internet and getting the server to handle requests. What the
needed was to integrate the "Front End" to the "Back End". We found
ways to do that using Java RMI, CORBA, and MQSeries. I was the lead
architect in the Architecture and Infrastructure division.
Essentially, I would evaluate different technologies, focus on the
standards, look at which products and packages (OSS and proprietary)
were compliant, and then evangalize them to the other departments.
Ironically, we did experiment with using NT 4.0 machines as servers.
The problem was that they seemed to multiply like rabbits and before
long we had 3000 NT servers doing the work of about 10 UNIX servers.
We had about 50 full time 'box booters" and 10 people whose full time
job was to figure out which boxes needed to be rebooted. The "Level 3
Support" was the team who took the boxes that wouldn't reboot anymore,
and would "reimage" them. We even had to back up one server's data to
another to make sure that the data was still available when it was
being rebooted. IIRC, the average uptime on those machines was about
85% on a "per box" basis. Within 18 months, we were trying to move the
data and applications back to UNIX or Mainframes.
I had a desk right across from the Microsoft Rep. I nice lady, who was
more than friendly and knew how to make an offer you couldn't refuse
sound so nice that you almost didn't want to. It give me an incredibly
intimate knowledge of how Microsoft did business. I found a copy of a
corporate contract on the copier (my supervisor had asked me to copy
something else at just that moment and it couldn't wait and he couldn't
e-mail it). It was a corporate license agreement between Prudential
and Microsoft. It fell on the floor and I put it back in the right
order and put it back on the copier. I remember almost everything I
read, even when I just "look at the pictures" (or page numbers). This
was educational as well.
I did make one contriversial reccomendation, which was that we NOT jump
right into Office 97 but suggested that we should wait for it's
successor. Office 95 was doing everything we needed it to do, and it
would give us more funding for some of the strategic initiatives we
wanted to implement. I think the savings was around $250 million on
100,000 desktops (including the cost of reinstallation, upgrades,
reimaging...). Microsoft lost about $25 million in revenue.
Microsoft did get even though. They decided they wanted a license
audit. They found CALS I'd never heard of. They decided that since
each Prudential customer was uniquely identified, that they were
"concurrent users". The comprimize was the maxumum number of uniquely
identified users to access a server in a one hour period. This of
course had to be multiplied by the number of servers being used for
that application, including all of the middleware and database NT
servers. They also decided that they wanted us to license 2 copies of
Windows and 2 copies of MS-Office because so many employees had
computers at home and must have pirated the software (even though most
of them had purchased OEM machines preloaded with Office). The license
hit and the cost of the audits was more than we would have paid
Microsoft for MS-Office.
The irony is that almost immediately after that audit, I was asked to
put together a demonstration of Linux for a meeting that the CIOs and
division heads were having. They wanted to see Linux in action. The
fun part was that I had four days to implement a client and server
demonstration which did the same core functions performed on an NT
server, which had taken almost 12 months to create. The request was
made Thursday afternoon, I was given a "recycle ready" Linux machine
(old and slow), I had a Laptop already configured with Linux, and by
tuesday afternoon, I had the Linux machine doing everything the NT
machine had been doing, and a few extra things.
We got everything set up that night, and the next morning, somebody had
pulled one of the plugs and put it into a different router. The DNS
was messed up. The manager, who was at the show, called me, at my
desk, told me the problem. I had him read me the DHCP address on the
two Linux machines, and within 15 minutes I had both machines up and
running. Then the manager opened a web browser on the machine being
used to do the NT demonstration and pointed that browser to the Linux
server. AT one point, the guy doing the demo didn't realize that he
was on the Linux box until he got to the "chat" window and realized
that mine was displaying things in "real time". It was also talking
back - giving stock quotes (dummied up of course). The CIOs loved the
demonstration, especially when the found out about the costs. The
server had depreciated to less than $200, the laptop had been purchased
used, for about $300, and it took about 1 staff/week to do something
that had taken 20 staff years to do on Windows NT.
When Prudential decided that the expenses for the Microsoft Licenses
should come out of the IT Department budget, they eliminated the
corporate IT division. I got offers from Microsoft, Netscape, and IBM,
all within about a week of knowing I would be available. I chose IBM.
At IBM I worked in the National Practice of the Enterprise Integration
organization. Remember the IBM commercial where the guy is showing off
spinning logos, and all these other cutsie graphics, and the guy says,
"what I really want is for the web server to pass orders to my
inventory, shipping, accounting, and billing systems, so that all the
pieces are working together". The guy showing off the "Front Page
Special Effects" stops, goes into a black stare, and says 'I don't know
how to do that". I did, and I would put together the architecture and
the teams and the plans to make that happen.
I did do one really big NT project. It was Windows NT 4.0. We had new
project components which were not supported on Linux or UNIX at the
time. We wanted to use that to integrate front-ends, back-end
databases, and Mainframes together.
We started out thinking we could put it all on one or two servers. We
ended up needing 5 dedicated server types. Each of these had to be
connected redundantly. We had to be able to fail-over to the other
server very quickly and recover back very quickly once the primary had
been rebooted. We had to do load balancing across multiple web servers
using yet another front end.
By the time we got to "phase 3", we moved the databases back to UNIX,
moved the Web Servers and portals back to Unix, and replaced one of the
applications that wouldn't run on Unix with one that would.
Today, when I offer the customer the choice of NT, Linux, or UNIX, for
a middleware solution, they almost consistently choose either Linux on
a stand-alone machine, or an AIX LPAR.
> Rex Ballard = The Commander McBragg of COLA.
>
> http://www.toonopedia.com/mcbragg.htm
Fun link. I remember Tennese Tuxedo and Commander McBragg.
Part of the fun of being a "behind the scenes" player is that you can
tell the truth and it's becomes incredible. I supposed I should have
left these big corporations and formed my own company(s) and made
$billions, but then I would have had to spend most of my time dealing
with minutia, accountants, stockholders, all of my customers, and I
wouldn't have had any time to do the stuff I enjoy most, creating magic
with computers, and enrolling people into possibilities that turn THEM
on and empower THEM in THEIR lives.
It is a bit comical. I've probably enrolled more leaders into taking
on actions that turned them into millionaires than even I know about.
I've probably encouraged those leaders to take on projects that were
worth $billions, maybe even $trillions. And yet, when I walk into a
customer's office in the first few days, he treats me like an ordinary
person, hoping I can help him with a problem of $2-3 Million with a few
hundred thousand worth of consulting. By the time I leave, I've
inspired projects that often yield hundreds of millions.
I like being an ordinary oddball. I like being able to tell a joke or
be silly, or say something really stupid, and not have to worry about
it getting quoted as headline news, or in some tabloid. I like it when
people wonder if I'm asking them for money, just as I am about to give
them access to projects worth $billions.
I'm not just an "idea man" either. I work with my clients, coaching
them, supporting them, providing teams to handle the "nasty stuff",
fostering communication between divisions, corporations, in some cases,
even bitter rivals, to facilitate a solution which creates openings for
the unimaginable.
http://www.open4success.org/bio
> --
> flatfish+++
> "Why do they call it a flatfish?"
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