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I'm using PostGIS (PostgreSQL with a plug-in) for the back-end, and QGIS for the client. With the above-mentioned system and 32GB it utterly blows away the performance I get at work from a big ESRI server and Oracle with ESRIs SDE plug-in. That's probably because the corporate server is throttled per-user, but still, it means that home-user GIS for zero software costs is really here in convenient form. I've developed a "mapping system" that loads in about 50 layers for my city with one script (works in Mac, Win, Linux, slight script changes) and co-workers are starting to ask me for it on their laptops. It actually runs fairly well on an i5 and 16GB, so it's possible I won't even get that much speedup from a faster chip...but I'm game to spend money trying!
The suggestion above that I move the PostGIS db file from SSD to ramdisk is a very worthy one; I'll be trying various experiments, but since I date back to 6502 chips, "get the latest" has always been step 1.
If you want to contact about GIS, my home page is at the Calgary Unix User's Group: http://www.cuug.ab.ca/branderr...

My Compaq P1210 catwarmer only died a few months ago, after daily use since early 1998. When the cat went to jump on top of the new LCD and simply landed on the desk behind, he was not amused. I put a pillow back there, and now it's his secret hiding place; he leans up against the back of the LCD for his catwarming needs. (This is Canada; as I write, a nasty mix of snow and rain is blustering around outside.)

I'm still discovering what my 1998 vintage, 21" Compaq P1210 can do. The last version of Mint, I discovered it doesn't top out at 1600x1200 - a new resolution of 1792x1344 came up in the drivers, and it seems to work. I think the phosphor can show that many pixels, because fonts got smaller but still readable.

Now, in 1998 when it was made, I don't think you could get 1600x1200; quite the futureproofed product.

Also, I have to keep it; it doubles as a catwarmer

The by-product of the reaction that generates the energy is the issue here. Efficiency losses on energy conversion has nothing to do with the reactions by-products impact on the makeup of the atmosphere.

Of course they do. Conversion losses mean that you need to burn more fuel to get the same amount of energy, which produces more by-products, which makes the impact bigger.

For a practical example, see this graph about steam engine efficiency: if you need to produce a megajoule of energy, a modern steam engine needs just a tiny fraction of coal to produce it than the first steam engines did, and thus also produces just a tiny fraction of CO2 as a byproduct.

I think he just shot himself in the foot by cooking up a thumbnail page with heavy scaled-down images:

http://www.cuug.ab.ca/branderr/hawaii11/kapalua_11.20/

Biiiiig no-no.

And yes, my eyes do water somewhat. Hehe.

but the OP said "I have held the line" -- by making the page ages ago, then never improving on it, huh -- so that's essentially putting it next to modern websites.. as if websites are generally going downhill, while he kept it oldschool and efficient. but it just happens to have next to no content, and zero design (or even userfriendlyness), so it doesn't weigh much.. big deal. I'm sorry, but he was asking for it. it's like saying the chair he nailed to a piece of wood doesn't use any fuel, unlike cars.

green links on dark blue was something people could get away with, yeah... but that's it. it never was more, and nobody with taste would have done that other than a joke at any moment in time. the page says to me "hi there, I didn't give a shit when I made this page, and I still don't".

also, saying "it's an old site" simply doesn't apply: http://www.cuug.ab.ca/branderr/hawaii11/ -- made today, and as you said, it doesn't exactly live up to today's standards. I mean sure, kudos for not using wordpress et all, but *no* kudos for not even trying to make it somewhat decent with whatever he used. and it's not like the interwebs isn't full of great examples, or as if learning from them take much more than pressing ctrl+f3. no, I insist, this is an abomination, and I protest.

merry christmas anyway :)

My home page remains where it has been since 1993 at the Calgary Unix Users Group: http://www.cuug.ab.ca/branderr ...clocks in at 9.2K, plus a 15K GIF and a 9.1K JPG (if you "turn on images" in your browser - remember when it was a realistic option not to?)

Suddenly, I remember. I remember the atrocious color schemes of the 90s again, I remember "best viewed with Internet Explorer" (the code word for "only viewable with Internet Explorer"), I remember the JPGs that took ages to load.

Thank you for making me remember by providing a site that embodies all that: that uncompressed goodness, "Cache-control: no-cache" (I'm sure it'll change any second now!), those 1.55s it took to load that page clocking in at 33KB... Yeah, I remember.

Totally unrelated: searching google for "www.cuug.ab.ca/branderr" had 224KB, but fired onload after 1.23 seconds.

Viewing With Alarm (VWA) the growth of web pages for the entire 18 years since.

Maybe you should do less Viewing and more Trying To Improve (... with alarm)?

My home page remains where it has been since 1993 at the Calgary Unix Users Group: http://www.cuug.ab.ca/branderr ...clocks in at 9.2K, plus a 15K GIF and a 9.1K JPG (if you "turn on images" in your browser - remember when it was a realistic option not to?)

I have held the line, while Viewing With Alarm (VWA) the growth of web pages for the entire 18 years since. I wrote Bob Metcalfe when he had a column at InfoWorld 15 years back, and he was Viewing With Alarm the exponential growth in Internet traffic and predicting the "collapse of the Internet" (had to eat those words - literally) because of it. My letter pointed out that his column constituted 2K of text - that was all the generated content that was bringing in the readers, (unless you count the 10K gif of Bob Metcalfe, and I don't), and the page had an additional 100K of framing and advertising-related image GIFs. His reply was somewhat defensive.

This last year, I had occasion to travel on the Queen Mary 2, where all internet is via satellite at a minimum of 34 cents per minute with their bulk plan. How quickly I grew to resent the giant Flash blobs that would be automatically downloaded with every page of a newspaper so I wouldn't miss the animated ads for the latest in car buys. At QM2 speeds, I'd have to wait about two minutes before I even had an "X" mark to click on to dismiss the ad. I was rather quickly cured of almost any interest in the Internet content at ALL, I did my E-mail, checked the google news headlines (fewest high-byte ads), and logged off.

My point: 90% of mail is spam. So are 90% of web page bytes. We just don't call it spam. We call it "the whole outside frame around the news page that we try not to see, but keeps jumping around into our field of view".

I haven't read every comment, but a quick search of the higher-modded ones indicates the word "Moore" doesn't even come up.

It seems that Stross's comments on the "End of Moore's Law" around 2020-2030 are not a matter for argument.

In 1987, a Scientific American article by the head of IBM's research division wouldn't commit to improvements beyond about 2002. By 1995, staff writer Gary Stix was back to point out that at 30 nm, electrons would start to wander between circuit elements by quantum tunnelling alone. In 1996, a father/son team, Dan & Jerry Hutcheson, with about 40 years in the business between them, noted that the problem wasn't just physics, but the point where nobody was willing to pay enough for a better chip to fund the exponentially-more-costly fabs. They were figuring on the curve flattening out by a few years ago.

Intel gleefully made fun of all of them with their introduction to 45nm technology in late 2007, but the problem was that 2007 was a little "late" already for 45nm - a strict Moore's Law prediction from 10 years earlier would have had it happen around 2003-4. I still have a news clipping of Andy Grove in the early 90's was predicting 4 GHz for 2001. (Still waiting, Andy.)

I summarized it all in a little essay for my local Unix group in 1996, The End of Moore's Law, Thank God! that has duly been made fun of since, as it repeated the "around 2005" predictions.

It's easier to make fun of if you assume the predictors are talking about a brick wall being hit, a "Last Chip" with no successors.

But nobody seems to be making fun of Stross, I think partly because we now have seen a sharp tapering off of GHz increases, years ago; and partly because the imaginary "wall" is now understood to mean a gradual flattening of the curve - we'll only realize it's actually flat after it has been for a few years.

I think those old 2005 predictions were pretty good in sense that it was the "beginning of the end", when the curve started to bend, when the 2nd derivative went negative, if you will.

The Hutchesons in 1996 talked a lot about the industry fragmenting into specialized products when the improvements tapered off; and now Mr. Stross is echoing that idea.

Normally, these discussions bring out what I call "Moore Boosters" who Just Believe, they got Faith, that the exponential curve will continue forever, "They'll Think Of Something". I'm not sure whether Stross placated these types with his handwave to quantum computing (don't forget DNA test-tube computers...) or whether they're finally going away. Guys: the industry has performed the Exponential Miracle for five decades now. But it's unwise to ever *expect* miracles, and less wise still to count on them.

The smart move is to assume Stross has it figured about right (he has done his homework) and then you can have only pleasant surprises.

Virtually all of my portable music listening is done on a bike or running. Every previous generation of MP3 player eventually bounced off my belt or tugged annoyingly as it bounced up & down on my shirt, or required an annoying band or harness. The shuffle, at 30g, can't be noticed, and with that clip that exerts about a pound of force, it just can't fly off. Hell, if it does (because I was hasty & incompetent clipping it on), the friction of the 1/8" jack in the socket will keep it from going off the sound cable, and the friction of the buds in my ears will hold it from pulling them out. It winds up swinging back & forth from my earbuds, unharmed.

Any multi-function device must necessarily be larger, to have any user interface bigger than one button. It must weigh more, enough to go back to the annoyances I have gratefully left. That's why my cell phone is in my pack en route to the train: I hate little weights bouncing up & down on my waist as I run.

Long live single-function and UI that is utterly minimal - preferably a single button. You don't have to push it for me at the factory, I can take it from there.

Virtually all of my portable music listening is done on a bike or running. Every previous generation of MP3 player eventually bounced off my belt or tugged annoyingly as it bounced up & down on my shirt, or required an annoying band or harness. The shuffle, at 30g, can't be noticed, and with that clip that exerts about a pound of force, it just can't fly off. Hell, if it does (because I was hasty & incompetent clipping it on), the friction of the 1/8" jack in the socket will keep it from going off the sound cable, and the friction of the buds in my ears will hold it from pulling them out. It winds up swinging back & forth from my earbuds, unharmed.

Any multi-function device must necessarily be larger, to have any user interface bigger than one button. It must weigh more, enough to go back to the annoyances I have gratefully left. That's why my cell phone is in my pack en route to the train: I hate little weights bouncing up & down on my waist as I run.

Long live single-function and UI that is utterly minimal - preferably a single button. You don't have to push it for me at the factory, I can take it from there.

Virtually all of my portable music listening is done on a bike or running. Every previous generation of MP3 player eventually bounced off my belt or tugged annoyingly as it bounced up & down on my shirt, or required an annoying band or harness. The shuffle, at 30g, can't be noticed, and with that clip that exerts about a pound of force, it just can't fly off. Hell, if it does (because I was hasty & incompetent clipping it on), the friction of the 1/8" jack in the socket will keep it from going off the sound cable, and the friction of the buds in my ears will hold it from pulling them out. It winds up swinging back & forth from my earbuds, unharmed.

Any multi-function device must necessarily be larger, to have any user interface bigger than one button. It must weigh more, enough to go back to the annoyances I have gratefully left. That's why my cell phone is in my pack en route to the train: I hate little weights bouncing up & down on my waist as I run.

Long live single-function and UI that is utterly minimal - preferably a single button. You don't have to push it for me at the factory, I can take it from there.

Thanks! Good to hear that it's at least possible for electronic to be cheaper than paper. Canada may switch one day, but the US experience will, I hope, make us very shy of the move.

And after a look at your income distribution on gapminder.org (see my presentation about cheap new computers and world development at

http://www.cuug.ab.ca/branderr/pmc - Brazil shows up around slide #48 ...I can see people have to quit calling you a 3rd-world country. There's a real need to uplift a lot of Brazil to the higher income standards of your middle/upper classes, but that's just a matter of time, now. Time and rural education.

Thanks for writing!

Sounds like the new big market is "ultra-mobile" mini-laptops, from those links to "MID" and "UMPC" in the Wikipedia.

My purchase of an Eee PC got me to do up a presentation for the engineers at work,

"Poor Man's Computer: Cheap Internet Appliances for the Whole World"

http://www.cuug.ab.ca/branderr/pmc

on the topic. Short version: as predicted by Dan & Jerry Hutcheson in Scientific American about 1997, the market is turning from "endlessly bigger and faster at the same price point" to "smaller and way cheaper if not as fast". We're taking our "Moore's Law gains" in the form of money rather than than speed, thanks very much.

And this price drop into $300 and $200 laptops (and under in the case of the XO) is colliding with the surge in global population that make $10/day or more in the developing world. Sales in the billions beckon. 100,000 per day? Hah. If they make the right product, they'll have to ramp up to many hundreds of millions per year.

I "reviewed" this in a presentation to my local Unix User Group, whole presentation with many pix at:

http://www.cuug.ab.ca/branderr/eeepc/

of which my favourite is my own "external mod" for it, that I keep the machine, mini-mouse, spare Ethernet cord and some USB keys all in a cookie tin:

http://www.cuug.ab.ca/branderr/eeepc/009_eee_armored.html

that *still* takes up little enough room in my pack that it can go anywhere, whether I know I'll need it or not.

But as slide #5 notes, the killer app for me is that I can give presentations with it. I can do that with a regular laptop, too, but this one's just 3X as easy to lug through the whole nightmare that is air travel in the 21st century. This is a combination of the hardware having a VGA-out and video signal up to 1600x1200 if needed, and that OpenOffice does Powerpoint files just fine these days. Sometimes I have to adjust a few font sizes, took about a half hour to check through 30 slides.

I "reviewed" this in a presentation to my local Unix User Group, whole presentation with many pix at:

http://www.cuug.ab.ca/branderr/eeepc/

of which my favourite is my own "external mod" for it, that I keep the machine, mini-mouse, spare Ethernet cord and some USB keys all in a cookie tin:

http://www.cuug.ab.ca/branderr/eeepc/009_eee_armored.html

that *still* takes up little enough room in my pack that it can go anywhere, whether I know I'll need it or not.

But as slide #5 notes, the killer app for me is that I can give presentations with it. I can do that with a regular laptop, too, but this one's just 3X as easy to lug through the whole nightmare that is air travel in the 21st century. This is a combination of the hardware having a VGA-out and video signal up to 1600x1200 if needed, and that OpenOffice does Powerpoint files just fine these days. Sometimes I have to adjust a few font sizes, took about a half hour to check through 30 slides.

The Calgary Unix User's Group got a great lecture from Aaron Seigo of KDE last week,

http://www.cuug.ab.ca/past-meetings/meetings.06-07 .html ...during which he either lied through his teeth about easily checkable claims for the near future, or KDE 4 is coming out in 2007 with significant improvements, and not just "chasing the taillights" of Mac and Vista, but leapfrog improvements upon them.

Assuming KDE 4 does come out in 2007, that'll be exactly 5 years behind KDE 3, about the same time from XP to Vista. They're developing as fast as a $100 Billion corporation, exactly how much more do you want?

The headline on this article is certainly senseless - in a "market" overwhelmed by a monopoly provider, there can be no bubbles to start with, at best you can incrementally develop a market share in small fringe areas where the monopoly's hold is weak. Mostly meaning non-US regions concerned about a lock-in by a foreign provider, especially governments. Also, particularly poor customers that can't avoid the $50 MS "tax" by piracy, because they have to play honestly, like educational institutions.

And in those areas at least, there's been slow but encouraging growth through 2006 and prospects for more. That's only a "bubble bursting" if you were deluded into imagining some take-off point of explosive growth was coming.

For the second time (and we're hoping for an annual tradition) the Hackathon has agreed to come up for air long enough to give a talk to the Calgary Unix Users Group.

This year, Bob Beck and Reyk Floeter will give a talk to the group and many Hackathon participants on their directions in wireless chipset support, advanced feature support, and security support.

At SAIT, June 1, 6PM - all details at

http://www.cuug.ab.ca/

Riverbed makes an appliance that may be suitable.

Basically, it's an appliance that sits between your WAN connection and the rest of your network. It understands most protocols that send bulk data over the network, and does transparent caching such that the clients on your network don't notice anything (except improved speed), and the server on the other end still thinks it's sending the data.

I saw a demo at a CUUG meeting, it was quite impressive.

"You've forgotten what was being discussed. One can easily download Fedora from one of the 10000 available FTP mirrors within a day or two of release. This is about downloading pirate content and software."

Is it?

When CUUG hosted a talk by RMS, we didn't have the bandwidth to host a GB+ video, so we distributed it by BitTorrent. Not only was it legal for us to distribute it in this way, RMS only consented to the video being made on the condition that it be freely distributable.

So, if Shaw starts to throttle BitTorrent, they throttle perfectly legitimate traffic like this.

http://www.monzy.org/audience/

http://www.monzy.org/audience/ICMI-2002-finalpub.p df

http://movis.net/research/audience/techniques.pdf

http://www.cuug.ab.ca/CUUGer/9705/confernc.html

Nearly 10 years back, before the word "blog" existed, I did a little web article called The End of Moore's Law - Thank God! that used the info in two excellent Scientific American articles which hypothesized a slow levelling off of the Moore's Law exponent around ... well, a year or two ago, actually, rather than a few years from now. But close enough.

The second Sci. Am. article stressed that it was an economic decision and drew parallels both to aviation (aircraft grew in size rapidly until the 747) and to trains (the biggest-ever locomotive was designed in the 50's)

In both cases, you wound up with the entire market being needed to pay the costs of the last generation of development. Presumably, the "Last Fab" will require a consortium of Intel, IBM, AMD, Motorola, etc - and make chips for all of them to pay off the $10 Billion construction cost.

Personally, I am curious why we don't look for more grand scale technological solutions to environmental problems.

How about this:

Russian Scientist Suggests Burning Sulfur in Stratosphere to Fight Global Warming

Just to give you a quantitative perspective, the amount of sulfur he is proposing to burn is abou half of this little stockpile:

http://www.cuug.ab.ca/kmcclary/sulfur/

Do not use!!!!!!!!!

A number of OpenBSD developers will be speaking at the CUUG meeting on tuesday the 24th. It's extremely interesting to see them discuss the stuff they do, and it's a good opportunity to ask questions.

Disclaimer: I am very involved with CUUG (current President)

Disclaimer: I am very involved with CUUG (current President)

The guy's on holiday, and not only does he read slashdot, but he takes the time to put a word in for CUUG.

Thanks Roy.

Theo and some of his visitors over the years have been very generous about speaking at meetings of the Calgary Unix Users Group.

This year, we cap off our best month in history, in which we have Richard M. Stallman speaking on May 18 at the University Science Theatres (seats 500). Less than a week later, Theo and the entire 50-ish turnout for the Hackathon, invited to the John Dutton Theatre of the main downtown library (seats 400), on May 24th.

The topic is PF, the packet filter; and the scheduled speaker, Ryan McBride - but the rest of the PF team will be there for question & answer. And with the entire Hackathon invited, the topic could wander a bit.

If you can make it, look for details at our web site:

http://www.cuug.ab.ca/

Roy Brander, P.Eng.
Chair, Calgary Unix Users Group

I will ask him at the CUUG (Calgary UNIX Users Group) meeting on the 18th.

At the jan CUUG meeting, there was this "religious war" thing and the Apple advocate was talking about how reliable Apple hardware was. I knew better, so I asked:

"Who here has an iBook?"

Maybe 20 people put their hands up.

"Who here is on your original logic board?"

Everyone put their hand down.

Apple sold flawed iBooks from 2001 to 2003, and given that they have access to all the warantee numbers they would have to be completely incompetent to not notice the higher failure rates. I therefore conclude that they knowingly sold flawed laptops to customers. The only question is why.

It's seriously hurt my trust with Apple. Everyone has bad days, but Apple knowingly sold bad machines over many revisions of the line. I feel that their admission of the flaw and offer to repair affected laptops for free was pretty much the minimum they could have done, as they faced a class action lawsuit otherwise.

"They are already a huge player. For all intents and purposes, they are the only player. Not "at the right price," however you define it, but at the prices they've been at for the past four years."

That isn't the case. Hard drive based iPod are too expensive to get to most people. While Apple dominates the hard drive player market to the point of monopolizing it, that market is a fairly small minority particularly when you consider other technologies.

Those that don't get cheaper flash or CD MP3 players are happy with old fashioned CD players, tape players, radios, or nothing. Those people don't even consider hard drive based iPods.

Of course, with what the shuffles cost I suspect Apple will be able to turn that around. Most players cheaper than a shuffle are pretty crappy, and Apple's never tried to compete with the bottom of the barrel.

There was an Apple speaker at the CUUG meeting on the 22nd and I couldn't get him to reveal any numbers on the shuffle, but I suspect they're going to be huge.

try this

Use JavaScript to write your e-mail on your web page to fool the spambots

Here's how

Can I get an upgrade kit for my Electrolux ?

what was the process to install that open source driver to run OSX

• Copy XPostFacto to a convenient location on your hard drive. You do not need to put it in a special location.
• Insert the Mac OS X Install CD (or Darwin, or Mac OS X Server, as the case may be)
• Launch XPostFacto
• Select the Install CD as the volume to start up from
• Select the target volume that you want to install Mac OS X to
• Click on the "Install" button
• Sit back and watch the action

what is an IT professional exactly? In your words anyhow

In the context of my post, it's a shorthand way of saying: Computer Science degree in 1981. Past president of the local Unix Users Group. Have worked as a programmer, got mentioned in Dr. Dobbs (Dec 1986 - Turbo Pascal hack). Have also been a systems analyst, project manager, supervisor of unix & network support group. Currently systems analyst/team lead; and I do freelance programming from time to time

...of course, I also code for fun

Bede Jet Corp.BD-10 may have been the first manned supersonic flight onboard a plane designed by a small private company It was a deadly, short lived, supersonic HOMEBUILT. Go supersonic, from your garage.
a fan's page
Results so far
The first one crashed, and the second one crashed as well. Each crash killed the then-president of the company developing the BD-10 for the market. Rights to the design were bounced around for a while, and I believe it's pretty much in limbo, now. At one point, a Canadian outfit was trying to develop it as a low-cost military trainer, but nothing came of it. I think there were four originally built... the Bede prototype, two crashed as noted above, and one constructed by a customer. There are two listed in the 2001 registration database. The prototype is still listed as being owned by Bede Jet Corporation, and the other one is registered to a man in California.(text from http://www.ipilot.com/learn/expert-view.asp?cur=0& cid=3)

CUUG, our local UNIX group, had a lawyer talking about this a couple of weeks ago. One thing that was very interresting was the fact that there is a good reason why Software is not sold to you, but licensed. If it were sold to you, it would become your property, and then a lot of laws would apply to it, giving you way to many rights, like re-selling it, reverse engineer it, etc... because it would be YOURS.

That is why the software industry has decided license software to you, because legally, when you license something to somebody, you can set whatever you want in the license, like "you shalt not reverse engineer this software", etc...

So, one would have to look at the license between SCO and IBM to be able to say if they can revoke it or not.

CUUG, our local UNIX group, had a lawyer talking about this a couple of weeks ago. One thing that was very interresting was the fact that there is a good reason why Software is not sold to you, but licensed. If it were sold to you, it would become your property, and then a lot of laws would apply to it, giving you way to many rights, like re-selling it, reverse engineer it, etc... because it would be YOURS.

That is why the software industry has decided license software to you, because legally, when you license something to somebody, you can set whatever you want in the license, like "you shalt not reverse engineer this software", etc...

So, one would have to look at the license between SCO and IBM to be able to say if they can revoke it or not.

Of course this was back in 1983 when he was OUR ruthless murdering bastard.

This is funny. Since any potential terrorists know they can't use their cell phones, the cops won't be able to use their high tech electronic survelance and locating equipment!!! haha.

Actually, Kananakis is Bear country. There are lots of Grizzly bears. I suspect the bears will effect a rather good security blanket against any protesters in fact. So get this picture. The cops will be hampered because they can't use electronic location methods but the Bears will be in fine form because they can sniff 'em out! haha.

Another point is the cops are so paranoid now that the Calgary Unix Users Group CUUG had to move the regular monthly meeting away from the downtown library because apparently we geeks are a security risk.

Oh, and no telecomunication services are to be changed either... which means that even though Telus has sent rather nasty announcments to the effect that our xDSL services are to be cancelled or switched over as of the end of June - apparently they won't hook up new services. Alas, methinks the idiot factor is getting rather high.

Part of what went wrong with the Therac 25 (a big part, I would say), was "the normalization of deviance". When things go wrong often enough you start to consider that the normal condition, and then you have moved from the original safe area with a zone of deviance in which risk is acceptable, to a new "normal", which is actually somewhere away from the original normal, and then the deviations around that become less safe. Lather, rinse, repeat, kill people.

The "text of speech" link from this page:

http://web.cuug.ab.ca/~branderr/risk_essay/NDIA/

is a great exposition on that. He points to Diane Vaughn's concept of "normalization of deviance". Once someone has pointed it out to you it's interesting how often it comes up.

For a great analysis of why the Titanic sank, see Roy Brander's articles

M-Tech, a Calgary company makes P-Synch, a cross-platform password management system. P-Synch supports over 60 types of systems including: Unix servers, Windows NT, Windows 2000 active directory, OS390 / MVS mainframes, LDAP directories, email, groupware and popular ERP applications, such as SAP and PeopleSoft.

M-Tech showed P-Sync off to the Calgary Unix Users Group last year. When I saw your story, I immediately thought if them.

Our local UUG (CUUG) ran a course where they put you step-by-step though the process of making a firewall in one evening. You just had to take the thing home and plug it into your cablemodem/hub or PC. They even made sure you had the right IP's for your local provider, being DSL or cable

Books are good, yes, but the UNIX/Linux community reaching out with projects kept simple to show the user something they can't do with Windoze is another way to clue the masses to the strenghs of other OS's.

Our local UUG (CUUG) ran a course where they put you step-by-step though the process of making a firewall in one evening. You just had to take the thing home and plug it into your cablemodem/hub or PC. They even made sure you had the right IP's for your local provider, being DSL or cable

Books are good, yes, but the UNIX/Linux community reaching out with projects kept simple to show the user something they can't do with Windoze is another way to clue the masses to the strenghs of other OS's.

A model of a solar or planetary system is called an orrery.

• Hand Crafted Orreries
  A Java Orrery Applet
  Another Java Orrery Applet

If you're looking for these, including this word in your search will find a lot more. Many types of orrery have been made of brass for hundreds of years.

The Challenger Launch Decision
Risky Technology, Culture and Deviance at NASA
by Diane Franklin

For those who want the 25-cent ludicrously short summary of the answer, and on the web so they don't even have to pay 25 cents, can find it near the bottom of a speech I gave to the National Defense Industry Association conference last year, posted here .

It's actually mostly about the Titanic -- I added in the material on the Challenger when I read Prof. Franklin's book and realized the deep similarities in the engineering and management cultures. It starts around slide 44.

The above URL has one link for the speech text, then links to all the slides. If you print the text (or use two browser windows) and then follow the slides on-screen, you can duplicate the whole presentation.

How can we have any faith in Canadian political parties when their web sites use such crappy OS solutions? High speed networking is useless without OS stability.

This page suggests that printing to the IBM 4019 is possible under linux. Just search for 4019.

Non-postscript, he "Used printtool to set it as an HP LaserJet." Postscript, you need a $95 card. He posted some settings and stuff, too. Are you using it as a network printer or right off the parallel? Are you using an IBM PC (the parallel port addressing can be different) or running SuSE 6.3 (lpd-old is faulty, go to their page for the upgrade)?

-jpowers