Slashback: Courseware, Towers, Drives

Slashback with more on ridiculously equipped PCs, Telstra's ambivalent stance on equipping its thousands of desktops, California's state-sponsored Oracle oversell, and more -- read on for the details.

Your school or mine? Francis Esmonde-White writes "Dr. Joe Schwarcz (aka 'Dr. Joe' on the discovery channel & Montreal radio station CJAD), Dr. Ariel Fenster, and Dr. David Harpp at McGill have been running the OCS (Office for Chemistry and Society) for some time now. Their view is that it is academia's responsibility to communicate science to the public. One such facet of this has been to put up a series of lectures available freely through the internet.

I thought this may be interesting in light of MIT's OpenCourseWare, and that there are other major online university education projects around... even if they aren't on the same scale. In any case, here is your chance to learn about all the neat stuff you were interested in, but never learned in your introductory chem class. My first class (world of chemistry) with 'Dr. Joe' included topics like medications, plastics, explosives and pollution, so it isn't the boring chemistry you may have been tortured with in high school!"

Put this in your drive and smoke it. Linuxfr.org says (translated from French):

' GNU Generation, a student association at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne, proudly announces the release of GNUWin-II, a collection of free and open source software for Windows, which luckily contains most of the software that was proposed some days ago on slashdot.'

It comes on a CD with more than 50 applications, articles, and a four-language (yes it's Swiss) html based interface to help newcomers discover Free Software. The complete GNUWin-II can be browsed online. The ISO image of the CD can be downloaded here or better on Swiss SunSITE mirror ftp or http.

But who can fit the most soundcards in one machine? An anonymous reader writes "As a follow up to the 37 operating systems, 1 PC you should check out this site http://fileserver.coleskingdom.com 24 hard drives in one PC. And he managed it under Windows 95."

Maybe it was the Zip factor. generic-man writes "Dataplay, a company built around creating a new miniature optical disc format, has announced that all employees have been put on leave as the company tries to come up with the $50 million it needs to stay afloat. The future of Dataplay is still up in the air."

Recursive trailers. A lot of readers were disappointed in the viewing options for the Two Towers trailer posted yesterday anakin876 writes "The TTT Hi-Res trailer is out, but still semi-hidden. The Apple Quicktime Page doesn't have the trailer listed (yet) but it does exist."

Harm, foul. Boone^ writes "You'll remember when California signed a huge deal with state consultant and Oracle reseller Logicon Inc. only to have it blow up in their face [1,2,3]. Gov. Gray Davis finally signed legislation ending the exemption for the state's information technology purchases from California's conflict-of-interest laws. Similar bills have come across the Governor's desk, but Pete Wilson and Davis both vetoed them in the past. Apparently the policy of 'no harm, no foul' reigns out west, since it takes a fiasco to produce change."

That many licenses must be worth some jetlag. In August, we mentioned the possibility (floated by Telstra itself) that the Australian phone company was considering rolling out Linux on as many as 45,000 desktops; an anonymous reader notes that Microsoft is not sitting by for that, and has dispatched Steve Ballmer to convince Telstra otherwise.

Comments

dispatched Steve Ballmer...

[homer_ca]

shouting and doing the monkey dance with Kylie Minogue

GIVE IT UP FOR ME!!!

Re:dispatched Steve Ballmer...

[fleppir]

to a fun trip through bushland performing those wild stunts Steve Irwin invented. One can hope for him encountering a peeved rattler down under, can't one?

Re:dispatched Steve Ballmer...

[gr0ngb0t]

except we dont have any rattlers here.

maybe a peeved Fierce Snake, Brown Snake, Taipan, Tiger Snake or Death Adder... just to name a few

Re:dispatched Steve Ballmer...

[hdparm]

One of each would do, thanks.

Re:dispatched Steve Ballmer...

[Anonymous Coward]

CROCODILES CROCODILES CROCODILES...

This line inserted intentionally to avoid the lameness filter.

Re:dispatched Steve Ballmer...

[Anonymous Coward]

test post

Windows?

[joyoflinux]

Well, I guess this Windows box is complete from "A-Z"!

Re:Windows?

[Forge]

Corect. This realy is none news.

It is trivial to put 26 SCSI drives on a single phisical controler card (2 SCSI 3 chanels. 14 devices each, including the controler itself. 26 SCSI drives total).

Or as this guy has done. IDE controlers. Some of which alow up to 4 chanels (I.e. 8 drives). I actualy built a test server with over a terabyte of storage space.

6 X Promise IDE controlers.
24 X 60 GB Hard Drives.
1 40 GB Drive
1 CDRW Drive
1 DVD Drive
1 IDE Zip Drive
2 10/100 NICs.

1.480 TB Raw Storage.
1.08 TB RAID 5 protected Storage.
40 GB On the primary tape backup protected drive (Only 1.3 GB used).

Re:Windows?

[Psx29]

What actually happens after all the drive letters are used up in windows? (Of course I could find out by mapping network drives over and over...but that would be insane)

Re:Windows?

[operagost]

Completely BSOD, that is, as soon as I dig up my copy of winnuke. He didn't bother to put on SP1.

Re:Windows?

[FuegoFuerte]

What actually happens after all the drive letters are used up in windows?

A:\
B:\
C:\
...
X:\
Y:\
Z:\
...
AA:\
AB:\
AC:\
etc...

In other words, nothing terribly exciting.

Re:Windows?

[Catiline]

No, he's lacking one letter; from what I can tell, a second floppy drive would B: all that holds him back though.

Re:Windows?

[neonsam]

Nope. You can't map more than the 26 letters. And B: is pretty rare these days...

Double letters? Where did you come up with that?

Re:Windows?

[hdparm]

Informative, my ass. Where did you see this?

Re:Windows?

[AJWM]

If you really wanted to, you could probably do it with just one hard drive if you partitioned it enough. (I dunno, is there a limit to the number of logical partitions Windows will recognize?)

Re:Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Double letters? Where did you come up with that?

Same place all slashdotters get the bs they spew out here. He pulled it right out of his ass.

Re:Windows?

[machine of god]

out of curiousity, does anyone know what happens after z?

Re:Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yo, B, you B stepping, B

Re:Windows?

[n3k5]

can you supply a link to some reference? and what exactly is between Z: and AA: ?

Re:Windows?

[Hobophile]

Or as this guy has done. IDE controlers. Some of which alow up to 4 chanels (I.e. 8 drives). I actualy built a test server with over a terabyte of storage space.

I am sure you are already aware of this, but for those who aren't: performance wise, it's not a good idea to attach more than one IDE drive to a given channel. You will lose a solid 30% of your performance, easily.

So while IDE is certainly the cheapest way to exceed a terabyte in storage, it might be better to use a controller like 3Ware's Escalade 7800/7850, which offers 8 IDE channels on one card, decent performance, and excellent Linux support to boot. The main drawback being that it costs significantly more than a two channel Promise card.

Disclaimer: I do not work for 3Ware, though I am a satisfied customer of theirs (own an Escalade 6400).

Re:Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

It depends. Usually, the drive or partition is inaccessible.

In some situations (I forget which) the drive or partition is allocated a letter starting over from 'A' but it will still be inaccessible by any 'normal' means.

When making a drive mapping to a network share you would expect to see the following message:

>>
There are no available drive letters left.

You cannot connect to any more remote drives until you disconnect from one or more drives.

If you need to make a new connection, disconnect from at least one drive and try again.

Re:Windows?

[n9hmg]

A:RTFA. Drives, not partitions.
B:dos style partitioning (standard in linux and many others, as well) 4 partitions, any of which can be extended partitions, which can each contain up to 4 logical partitions. 16 partitions/drive.

Re:Windows?

[ncc74656]

Nope. You can't map more than the 26 letters. And B: is pretty rare these days...

I probably have the only dual Athlon MP system with a 5.25" floppy drive. :-) (That drive and a Supra 14.4 faxmodem are all that's left of the 286 system I built 10 years ago...and the drive is the only part currently in use.) Something that might be a little bit more common, though, would be to see a Zip drive (or other removable-storage drive) show up as B:...my SCSI Zip never did that, but I've seen it happen with IDE Zip drives in some systems.

Re:Windows?

[langed]

Not necessarily.

Even without the use of some win32-equivalent of LVM to "join" multiple drives on the same drive letter, win95 uses the DOS-like nomenclature of hard drives starting at C and going to Z. Hardest part is finding controllers to drive it--and you can have 4 or more IDE hard drives using standard controllers, and 7 with SCSI 1, 15 with SCSI 2, and even more with SCSI 3, without daisy-chaining controllers. If you daisy-chain you can have this many drives per controller (so with 3 SCSI-1 cards in the slots and the dual IDE controller on the MB, I could easily pull this off.) So, as I see it, if the drives all have a single partition, all you'd really need is a really big case and power supply(or several cases with their own power supplies--if there's some dummy motherboard in there, the MB isn't gonna care that there's a drive powered by that supply that it can't access.)

But to finish my point, there's no guarantee that drive B is used; most PCs of today don't have a second floppy disk drive. For that matter, the first floppy drive isn't essential, either--a single change in the CMOS settings on the computer, and most PCs can be configured to boot from a hard disk without even throwing an error code if the floppy fails/doesn't exist.

24 drives? Yeah, I've done that--with a single disk and lots of logical partitions.

Re:Windows?

[afidel]

Better yet use 12 channel 3Ware controllers and do it with 2 =) I believe 3 is supported and 4 possible. Of course it would be best to give each controller its own pci bus as each could saturate anything up to PCI-X.

Re:Windows?

[Forge]

1. Sory I didn't mention that it was Linux.

2. I just used what came in the shipment. The aim was to make sure all the drives were in working order before actual deployment.

3. Performance was not an isue at all (See #2).

4. We are seriusly considering a new archive server for the office. Again, performance isn't the major concern so we would shamelessly do 16 200-300 GB drives on an 8 controler card.

Boy I wonder...

[Anonvmous Coward]

"n August, we mentioned the possibility (floated by Telstra itself) that the Australian phone company was considering rolling out Linux on as many as 45,000 desktops... "

Assuming they're running RedHat, where are they going to keep their 135,000 system discs?

Re:Boy I wonder...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get it. I suppose a desk or a drawer would work.

Re:Boy I wonder...

[Snookmz]

Go back to Slackware man, :P

Re:Boy I wonder...

[Anonymous Coward]

135,000? What's stopping them from ordering one copy and installing it over NFS?

Nice troll though.

Re:Boy I wonder...

[mvdw]

What's stopping them from ordering one copy and installing it over NFS?
What's stopping them from installing directly from the Australian Mirror?

Re:Boy I wonder...

[mrhuman]

WAIT, isn't this one of the *good thing* about linux. you don't have to worry about complex licensing. the point is that you *could* use the same set of disks for the entire 45,000 desktops

Re:Boy I wonder...

[oh]

Telstra may be a big ISP, but they are distributed all over the country( and world). Can you imagine the bandwidth wasted when you pull a copy of the distro. between cities EVERY TIME you load up a new PC? Now think about pulling that through your firewall.

Settign up mirrors is easy, wget and one line in cron will do it for you. If you set up your DHCP server correctly, you can even use the same floppy disk image at every site.

Re:Boy I wonder...

[RedWizzard]

Telstra may be a big ISP, but they are distributed all over the country( and world). Can you imagine the bandwidth wasted when you pull a copy of the distro.

Telstra won't care about internal bandwidth wastage because Telstra owns the lines so it doesn't cost them anything unless a customer that wants to pay for that bandwidth.

Ballmer vs. the jetlag

[Anonymous Coward]

"Microsoft is not sitting by for that, and has dispatched Steve Ballmer to convince Telstra otherwise. "

I think I see a pattern here -- announce move to linux on day 1, on day 2 sign a deeeeeply discounted deal with Microsoft.

Hmmm...

Re:Ballmer vs. the jetlag

[gTsiros]

As a side effect (apart from showing the business practices of corporations) shows just how much scared m$ is running after (potential lost) customers.

I'd like this question answered...(i know it isn't possible to answer):
What is the ratio of copied/original windows pcs out there? (all kinds of m$ windows, x86 architecture only). "Original" here means from each original m$ installation discs, the "legally" allowed installations on HDs. Anyway, you get the idea. That's the question.

Re:Ballmer vs. the jetlag

[djupedal]

Are you talking about liscences? This is where it gets muddy...since the stats are clouded by how many MS sells to OEM's (years ahead of actual use, BTW), vs. how many the OEM's actually deploy off the assembly line. We may never know the real figures. And as for reality, how can we ever know exactly how many copies of MS have been made/used.... This kind of discussion is far too subjective to yield anything more than fervor.

Re:Ballmer vs. the jetlag

[pyman]

I think I see a pattern here -- announce move to linux on day 1, on day 2 sign a deeeeeply discounted deal with Microsoft.

Or more likely: day 2 MS threatens to audit, sending telstra scrambling for 45000 WinNT4 licenses... day 3: telstra signs standard subscription deal for next X years to avoid lawsuit.

Re:Ballmer vs. the jetlag

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I see a pattern here -- announce move to linux on day 1, on day 2 sign a deeeeeply discounted deal with Microsoft.

My company uses thousands and thousands of servers in rackmounts, and up until XP, we had a site license for all M$ products. When XP came around, they said, "Nope, no more... you have to individually track every computer." Now, since 80% of the systems are totally indentical hardware-wise, the product activation might be fooled, but there there was the issue of lawsuits should they find out, and as big as we are, M$ is far bigger. This was insane, there was no way in hell we could track all these systems without hiring a team just for that purpose.

So we partnered with Sun, made a deal with HP, burned a few Red Hat disks and if you HAVE to have an M$ machine, you get and old Windows 2000 box. M$ said they didn't care. We found Linux ran faster and cheaper, with more options on older hardware. We could now literally run a system until its hardware failed; before we were throwing out systems because M$ kept upgrading the hardware requirements. Now we can use a 486 for a LAN manager, a router, or just a smart terminal.

That was last year. A few weeks ago, while talking about drive image backups, one of the managers told us that M$ had given us "special" XP disks that require no PA... now, these disks are supposedly "un-reburnable" but I bet someone could figure out how to do this, and if WE have a copy, I bet someone in Hong Kong has a stack of them in his house, selling them through eBay or something.

M$ knows their product. It's a drug. That's why we're called "users." For many years, they gave the drug "for free," it was insanely easy to copy an M$ OS. It's what made them #1, just like they did with Windows Media player and MSIE. They waited until we got "hooked," and then they charge an arm and a leg. $200 for XP pro? One machine only? Yep, time to pay the dealer for your OSmack, it ain't free no more, kid, I gotta make a living somehow. Dealers don't care about their users, they only care about their money, and will do what it takes to get that money any way they can.

But then came Linux. Linux is a slippery beast because they don't need a profit margin. It's a superior OS that never crashes, is free, a lot more secure, and a thousand times more versitile than Windows ever was. It was a system built by people sick of bad systems. It is not designed to make money, so M$ tactics to drive it out of "business" can't work.

My guess is that M$ will back off the PA and cut prices eventually. I think in 5-10 years, they will be the AOL of OS's, for granny and Mr. Need-it-for-pr0n-browsing, but students and business people will be on Linux.

Go Aussies!

Re:Ballmer vs. the jetlag

[Anonymous Coward]

Step 1: Announce move to Linux
Step 2: Sign a deeeeeeeply discounted deal with Microsoft
Step 3: Profit!!!

Looks like this making money off of Linux wasn't a sham afterall! :]

Re:Ballmer vs. the jetlag

[Green Light]

Or rather:

1. Announce move to Linux
2. ????
3. Profit!!!

Re:Ballmer vs. the jetlag

[Anonymous Coward]

Also consider the number of machines that have paid twice. My current laptop came with an installed Windows98 which corporate IS wiped and installed Windows 2000. This machine now is counted in our annual licence fee to MS and paid for, so we have paid for it twice as are most systems in this office.

Re:Ballmer vs. the jetlag

[FattMattP]

Maybe in the future companies that are planning to switch to Linux on such a large scale will tell their PR department to STFU until the deal is done.

Re:Ballmer vs. the jetlag

[Neon Spiral Injector]

Actually it is easy to get the no activation required version of XP. While I don't run Windows, I did build a machine for someone. They gave me a CD that said Windows XP on it, but it was obviously a copy. I asked if they had a serial number, and they said it wasn't needed. Turns out it was an student version. One of the local colleges makes copies and sells them for $15 to students, and it is totally legal and sanctioned by MS.

Re:Ballmer vs. the jetlag

[Dynedain]

If thats the case....then my small company (me + uh....me) is interested in switching to Linux.

Re:Ballmer vs. the jetlag

[Danse]

Nah. Linux doesn't support DRM. It can't, since the source is available and anyone could remove or disable the DRM portions. So all MS will have to do is go along with Hollywood and the record industry and demand that all operating systems be required by law to support DRM. Linux will become The Choice of Thieves and Terrorists(TM). Easy as pie (and a few hundred million in bribe^N^N^N^N^Ncampaign contributions.

Re:Ballmer vs. the jetlag

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL... bedtime for me... try to imagine those "^N"s are "^H"s instead... oh and close the parens.

Re:Ballmer vs. the jetlag

[Anonymous Coward]

Those versions of XP that do not require activation are out there. I worked in IT up until last August (Oddly, I seem to be one of the few that resigned from this field) and spent numerous hours sitting in my office merrily burning XP Pro CDs. We had an MS site license and had expressed great displeasure at the thought of having to "activate" each machine. MS at first informed us that activation would not be a hassle in the slightest (Ha! Try going through the process on thousands of machines and then try to tell me that) and that we should get used to the idea as all MS products would have this "feature" in the future. Eventually, they cracked and gave us a version with the activation "feature" disabled so that we could image the machines as opposed to loading individually.

Regardless of the situation and our case in particular, it brings up a key point in the MS strategy for dealing with their relatively large corporate customers. The feeling on their side of the fence seems to be, "Hey, you just have to deal with it because you don't really have a choice." Like the Aussies, we needed only to hint at Linux before they quickly jumped to their toes and offered up a solution which they previously said could not be done. Perhaps the fact that our IT department supported a large school district had something to do with it... Funny how the thought of youngsters growing up on something other than the MS goldmine scares them.

Re:Ballmer vs. the jetlag

[Jason Earl]

Actually, if the point is to put pressure on Microsoft then the smartest thing to do would be to advertise that you are getting ready to switch 45 kajillion desktops to Linux. Microsoft can't afford to let even one large company switch to Linux, because if they did then lots of other smaller companies would start to have second thoughts about Windows licensing. One successful Linux desktop implementation on the scale Telstra is talking about and Microsoft would no longer be a given on the corporate desktop.

So Telstra threatens to switch to Linux and the next thing you know Balmer is sweating and dancing his way down under with a big fat discount on Windows licenses.

Personally I think that it makes more sense to simply push for a switch to OpenOffice on Windows with Linux servers. That way you don't have to worry about migrating your entire desktop, but you still save a substantial amount of dinero.

Re:Ballmer vs. the jetlag

[Pogue Mahone]

I think I see a pattern here

I also see a business model (hurries off to US patent office).

Re:Ballmer vs. the jetlag

[extra88]

You don't know what you're talking about. Microsoft does not hide the fact that you can purchase versions of their software which do not require activation. They're called Volume License Product Keys and these days they require different media than the retail versions. If your company had thousands of Windows machines, they would be stupid to not already be in one of Micosofts licensing programs.

The rest of your message is mix of misinformation and delusional Linux zealotry.

Re:Ballmer vs. the jetlag

[tundog]

Thanks for the tip Steve!

Re:Ballmer vs. the jetlag

[merlin_jim]

But then came Linux. Linux is a slippery beast because they don't need a profit margin. It's a superior OS that never crashes, is free, a lot more secure, and a thousand times more versitile than Windows ever was.

Ummm... hate to disagree, but Linux certainly crashes. I've never had a Linux system that didn't coredump occasionally. I've had maybe 5 or 6 different linux boxen at one time or another, distros slackware 3.4, slackware 8, redhat 6, SuSe 7.1 and SuSe 8.

I have a Linux server at home built by me out of top quality parts with excellent cooling that freezes up. Even when my Windows box crashes, at least Ctrl-Alt-Del still works. This Linux server crashes so bad that I have to hit the power button. And it does it usually within 36 hours of power-on.

All that said I do believe that Linux is more stable than Windows. But please, don't say that it never crashes.

Re:Ballmer vs. the jetlag

[Marc2k]

And it does it usually within 36 hours of power-on.

Then you are doing something SEVERELY wrong. Also core dumps are different than crashes, and I'm sure you know this well. The whole point of protected memory is that situations that cause core dumps don't bring down the system, Windows is STILL struggling with that concept (though certainly the NT kernel handles this amazingly better than the 98 series).

Re:Ballmer vs. the jetlag

[merlin_jim]

And it does it usually within 36 hours of power-on.

Then you are doing something SEVERELY wrong.

I didn't say there wasn't something wrong.

What I did say is that I'm getting freezes. To elaborate, I am reliably and consistently getting complete system crashes requiring a hard boot to rectify, on an out-of-the-box unmodified distro on supported hardware that was installed by a knowledgeable computer technician, according to and in most cases way above spec. See where I'm going with this?

Specifics of my procedure are:

a. Install hardware. Big FDB harddrives properly cooled. AMD 2000+ processor on a supported, AMD logoed motherboard. Quality DDR RAM.
b. Install extra fans and hardware protection. Vibration dampening, 6 fans, 450 W power supply (way over spec), memory heat sinks, big HSF on CPU (Zantec all-copper flower with fan at full speed for those interested), etc.
c. Insert Slackware 8 install image, let it do what it wants.
d. Measure system temperatures at key locations during install. No temperature measured was over the manufacturers' spec. My procedure for this is to open the case, tape the temp probe to the appropriate location, close the case, and wait 15 minutes for temperatures to stabilize.
d. After the install is complete and tested, power down, unplug monitor and keyboard, and power up.

That's it. I didn't do anything special or out of the ordinary. I'm not doing anything wrong from the perspective of configuration. It shouldn't be freezing. But it is. Therefore I do not consider the phrase "never crashes" as being applicable to Linux at this time.

Re:Ballmer vs. the jetlag

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, have you tried Windows on the same machine?

I had the same situation, and it was caused by a faulty motherboard.

Re:Ballmer vs. the jetlag

[gfxguy]

That's what I was thinking. Just because it runs for a little while doesn't mean it's not faulty hardware. I've had similar problems with both windows and Linux, and when the hardware was solid, Linux never crashed (although X and other applications did).

Re:Ballmer vs. the jetlag

[gfxguy]

You'll have to dress up your announcement:

Dynedain Inc. has announced it will switch over all it's desktop systems to Linux as a cost saving measure.

Only 24?

[CaptainCarrot]

Presumably the two missing letters here are for his floppy and CD-ROM. He should try it with some OS that doesn't insist on using single letters of the alphabet to designate partitions. Like VMS, better known as the Operating System of the Gods, where you can find such euphonious device names as DKA0: Real VMS gurus know without being told that any device so bold as to be called DVA0: had damned well better be a floppy drive!

Which one's my CD-ROM? Ummmm....

Re:Only 24?

[susano_otter]

You've overlooked the fact that putting a lot of drives under an OS that can trivially handle a lot of drives is uninteresting. Finding hardware that plays nice with Win95 and has the bus(es) to support lots of drives, and getting the whole thing to work is the opposite of uninteresting. And no more pointless than your beloved VMS device names.

Re:Only 24?

[Dusty]

Which one's my CD-ROM? Ummmmm....

$ show logical *cdrom*

(LNM$PROCESS_TABLE)

(LNM$JOB_87B9EA00)

(LNM$GROUP_000260)

(LNM$SYSTEM_TABLE)

"$CDROM1" = "_ULYDV$DKA400:"
"$CDROM2" = "_ULYDV$DKA500:"

(DECW$LOGICAL_NAMES)
$

Works for me.

Re:Only 24?

[orangepeel]

Presumably the two missing letters here are for his floppy and CD-ROM.

Close. The two missing letters will be A and B ... which are BOTH reserved for floppy drives.

Then again, with the DOS "subst" command (which Windows 9x respects), it might be possible to find a sneaky way of adding two more drives to his system (and assigning them as A: and B:).

Re:Only 24?

[p3d0]

My bet is he couldn't use A and B, and used all the rest.

Re:Only 24?

[calibanDNS]

If you check this screenshot you can see that the "A" drive is a floppy drive and there is no "B" drive. There is also no CD-ROM drive present. I'm curious what would happend under Win9X if he were to add another drive; it would be as simple as mapping a network drive. Is Win9X smart enough to support this and use something like double letters for the drive, like the "AA" drive?

Re:Only 24?

[doublem]

Sorry, no Dice. The drive will go unused and unmounted, unless it takes the place of another drive.

There is no AA: in Windows

Two floppies and 24 other mounted partitions is the max.

Now, more than one physical drive can be used as a single drive letter via RAID, but that's another story.

Re:Only 24?

[Bios_Hakr]

Just checked in Win2k...The highest drive letter is Z:

Re:Only 24?

[Skjellifetti]

Yes, but with Win2K, you can mount drives just like in Unix. No need for drive letters beyond C. Of course, it is still windows so you likely cannot mount more than 24 partitions.

Re:Only 24?

[ErikTheRed]

In some older versions of DOS, you could overflow the drive letter counter and get [:

Ahhhhh... the good old days...

Re:Only 24?

[CaptainCarrot]

Boy, you have a nice sysadmin...

I was being silly. Of course I know which one the CDROM is; it's DKA600. (Now isn't that obvious?) Those logicals you have pointing to them ain't necessarily there though. I don't have them anyway, and there's nothing in the OS that makes you put them there. If your sysadmin expects the users to have more 1337 than average (as ours do, sometimes without justification) they won't bother.

Re:Only 24?

[Matey-O]

'Like VMS, better known as the Operating System of the Gods'

Dude. Have you USED VMS? [shudder.]

The 'set' command had, like _400_ different behaviors.

Re:Only 24?

[CaptainCarrot]

That's right. You practically need to be a god to keep track of it all.

I use VMS every day. It's what I do all my real work on.

Re:Only 24?

[Bios_Hakr]

The mounting scheme we use is based on drive letters. NOC policy is to have a 14GB OS/Program Files partition and a 4GB Data partition. Thoes are C: and D:. The D: drive gets mirrored weekly to our SAN.

Then we have several other drives. These are all network mounts for file plans and other assorted shit that *SHOULD* live on a decent intranet page. All of these drives are mounted as like T:, O:, P:, and whatever. AFAIK, there is no way to mount a network drive (or physical, for that matter) to c:\mnt\My_Network_Drive\

I'm not saying you are wrong about the mount thingy, but if MS had figured that one out, I think they'd advertise it like it was the second coming of christ...

Re:Only 24?

[buck_wild]

Al, is that you?!?

Re:Only 24?

[CaptainCarrot]

No.

Re:Only 24?

[SN74S181]

You can STILL, in Windows 2000, do my old favorite DOS trick.

'call command call' typed at the command prompt gives you a new environment, in which none of your enviroment variables (path, prompt, etc.) are initialized. Followed by 'prompt $s' and a 'cls' and the C> prompt itself goes away. You can get back to exactly the environment you were in by simply typing 'exit' but do it to the unclued and they're sitting there at a blinking cursor and can only run internal commands and whatever commands are in the PWD.

Fun with annoying MS-DOS pranks.

(*It's actually a useful technique, because it allows you to blow away the environment and build one totally anew, and get right back to your normal enviroment with a single 'exit' command. I discovered this behavior on my own one day when I was fooling around with a program called 'ball' and noticed peculiar things about the reserved word 'call')

Re:Only 24?

[kscguru]

There most certainly is a way ... my VMWare images are on a third partition mounted at C:\VMWare right now. It does require the base filesystem (in this case on C:) to be NTFS, though. (not sure if the mounted one has to be NTFS or not)

But, like all truly useful Windows tools, you gotta dig to find this one.

Go to Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management. Choose the Disk Management item (left pane), which will bring up a diagram of all your partitions in the lower-right pane. Right-click on any available partition (except your C: partition!) and choose Change Drive Letter and Path. When you try to add a new location, it will allow you to specify a directory as a mount point - a la the *nix mount command.

Plus, you get a little drive icon in the middle of a list of folders - I'll bet very few people have one of those! This way only works on physical disks as far as I know - but it's a great way to make a drive bigger when you run out of space.

My prediction for the future: the next edition of Windows will encourage you to mount your /hom... er... C:/Documents and Settings/ directory from Hailstor... er... your Really Big And Expensive Windows Server!

Re:Only 24?

[RedWizzard]

AFAIK, there is no way to mount a network drive (or physical, for that matter) to c:\mnt\My_Network_Drive\

I'm not saying you are wrong about the mount thingy, but if MS had figured that one out, I think they'd advertise it like it was the second coming of christ...

You certainly can mount physical drives to any path under NTFS5 (i.e Win2K and up), using NTFS5's reparse points. The mountvol command is one way to do this (see KB article 205524 for details). You can also use the Disk Management applet. As for why MS don't promote this feature, who knows? I guess it's just not that important.

Re:Only 24?

[boots@work]

Even if Windows did double drive letters to give you AA:, it would break practically every program that tried to use them assuming they were single. I hate to think how many libraries have something like

if (isletter(p[0])) && (p[1]==':')) ..

Re:Only 24?

[Anonymous Coward]

subst'ing a dir to a drive is trivially easy compared to mounting a partition|drive to a dir in the first place (assign/join won't work here for obvious reasons).

Re:Only 24?

[TheToon]

And as a meaningless nitpick:

OS/2 supports double drive letters, so there you can have AA:...

Maybe that's where this DOS/Windows double letter teories comes from?

Re:Only 24?

[Skjellifetti]

It is there (at least for local partitions, never tried it with network mounts), but it is a bit picky. For example, the target directory of the mount must be empty. Try creating a dir (C:\foo) and then touch a file in foo. You can no longer mount a partition under foo.

Re:Only 24?

[doublem]

OS/2 supports double drive letters, so there you can have AA:...

Yes, but can it do tripple letters like AAA:?

If yes, then I'd bet there's be a few network shares with the drive letters SEX:, and you can guess what people would PUT on those drives!

Re:Only 24?

[Anonymous Coward]

Using NTFS5 you can mount drives into directories, like in Unix. It's just not a well documented/promoted feature.

Re:Only 24?

[Dusty]

Boy, you have a nice sysadmin...

Strictly speaking, I am the sysadmin. But it was set up that way before I took over.

Its the first time I've had to look after Vaxes, and they are the easiest, most lovely boxes to look after. Could be the way my predecessor set them up, but even someone finding the 'interruptable' part of the UIPS, left them with no data loss, ready to start when the power was restored.

I was being silly. Of course I know which one the CDROM is; it's DKA600. (Now isn't that obvious?) Those logicals you have pointing to them ain't necessarily there though. I don't have them anyway, and there's nothing in the OS that makes you put them there. If your sysadmin expects the users to have more 1337 than average (as ours do, sometimes without justification) they won't bother.

You can always slip a 'define' in your login.com for the hard to remember stuff. Or ask your sysadmin to put in something more global.

Re:Only 24?

[buck_wild]

Ah. Sorry.

zipped movie?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone explain to me why apple zips (or uses stuffit) on their movies? Wouldn't you think that a good compression algorithm in their encoder would take care of most of it? (and it does -- full screen is 39 meg zipped, 40 unzipped)

Re:zipped movie?

[joe_bruin]

it's zipped so you download the movie instead of streaming it. the 'not quite power users' of the world sometimes have trouble getting their machine to do the right thing.

Re:zipped movie?

[JebusIsLord]

actually i believe it has to do with how macOS 9 and below keep data in 2 places - a data fork and a resource fork. Things you download have to keep both intact so they either need to be zipped, macbinary'd or whatever.

Hmmmm

[dnoyeb]

Seems like Linux has a viable strategy in the works. Wonder how M$ will respond?

Port GNU applications to windows and let people get comfortable at home before they make the Linux Journey.

Free. Nasty. M$ style warfare.

Re:Hmmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh Man! Your website is the sux0r!

>> Wonder how M$ will respond?

Hmmmm Hmmmm (masturbates furiously) Hmmmm!

In other news...

[Cubeman]

...he will be upgrading to 320 GB hard drives now that his Apache logs have filled up drives C-Z!

Re:In other news...

[grant harris]

Reminds me of the logs on my site.. 290mb gzipped.

DOWNLOADS! *kick ass*

[autopr0n]

ah, it's so much nicer to be able to actualy *download* something, rather then trying to 'stream' it, and then not being able to watch it again. Quicktime files can usualy be dug out of the cache, but still.

The weird part is that it's as a .zip file. I still find it very strange that quicktime files can be further compressed with pkzip, but whatever. (Or maybe they just did it so it wouldn't automaticaly be played in the browsers of the not-so-smart...)

Hardware List for the Slashdot Possibility

[EraseEraseMe]

Specfications:
P-120
80 Meg Ram
10 base T Ethernet
1.44 floppy drive
Soundblaster 16
Serial Mouse
Creative Graphics Blaster SVGA
24 hard drives by various manufactures
14 IDE
10 SCSI
Soundblaster 16 IDE controller on the sound card
2 Promise ATA 66 crontrollers( Running at 33)
1 Adaptec AHA-1510 SCSI controller.
1 Adaptec AVA-1515 SCSI controller.
Windows 95 OSR1

Shame there isn't more information on how he did it and any problems he encountered. I've had a hell of a time in the past getting SCSI and IDE drives to co-operate under Windows :/ Although, 30Gb of space on this is pretty damn impressive..and if it's only a fileserver why do you need any faster a processor?

I'd just hate to be the person to have to move it :/

Re:Hardware List for the Slashdot Possibility

[shogun]

Comeone, its called THE BEAST there can't possibly be any way we can slashdot it, its even running Windows 95 to boot!

Re:Hardware List for the Slashdot Possibility

[fuzza]

30Gb of space on this is pretty damn impressive

I think I'll stick to my 30Gb single IDE drive in my Debian P100 home gateway, if it's all the same to you... :)

Re:Hardware List for the Slashdot Possibility

[Pike65]

That actaully really freaked me out.

I just built a machine with almost exactly the same spec (with only five drives RAID0, admittedly) to use as a NAT box for our DSL line at home.

Because it was originally an old IBM PC Server it's the size of a small car and weighs twenty-five kilos, and I named it The Beast.

Scary.

Although mine is painted black. It just had to be done . . .

this is super...a Microsoft ad

[ruebarb]

so I'm reading about how we're trying to save and advance Linux.

and I see the article from Telestra..

and I reload (cause of a link I followed) and I have a Microsoft ad at the top of the page.

Is it just me, or does Microsoft have NO idea who their target market is and isn't...LOL

RB

Re:this is super...a Microsoft ad

[Why Should I]

Actually I believe there must be some connection between any mention of the word Microsoft in an article, and the running of a Microsoft add on that articles post.

It makes sense. MS is trying to provide the negatice news it always seems to be receiving on slashdot with its standard PR machine diversion/balance.

Wonder if it is actually working on some slashdotters.

Re:this is super...a Microsoft ad

[Vinum]

There has been a conspiracy theory for a long time that /. is actually funded by Microsoft... See... any publicity is GOOD publicity (think mindshare.) Furthermore, tons of geeks who could be hacking the Linux kernel are wasting their time here... heh.

Yes.. I waste time here, but I can't code these days. Just got divorced, too depressed. I'll be fine again soon and you won't see me wasting time here anymore. :)

Re:this is super...a Microsoft ad

[Anonymous Coward]

Good luck, mate. You'll be fine!

California Gov. & law

[CodeMunch]

for more info, visit EGray

Re:DOWNLOADS! *kick ass*

[GigsVT]

They probably want it to wind up on P2P, forcing people to download it uncourages that.

My View On Dataplay

[MBCook]

Here is my view of Dataplay. First off the technology is very good. And it's perfect for MP3s. The cost per meg (if you only count the disks) is very cheap (compared to other removable media that size). I recently saw the play and disks in person at a Best Buy and I've gotta say it looks really cool. The problem is that it's out too late. If it came out back when MP3 players were pretty new (origional Nomad and whatnot) it would have been amazing. But these days, if I'm going to plop down $400 for a MP3 player, I'm going with a 20gig iPod (those rock), not a little 500meg thing.

Maybe if I could use it to do other things like buy music for it like I can on CDs. They even say you can! But wait! Can you find any? I doubt it. Can't find a player either (unless the MP3 player does it too). You wanna use it as a tiny CD-RW? Cool! So would I, it's small (and rules compared to Click! drives (or Zip Pocket as they're known now)) and holds alot. But wait! You can't get a drive. You could use the MP3 player as one but, should I have to buy a $400 MP3 player if all I want is something to backup a few files to? How 'bout a PCMCIA type 3 card that could read them and such? Nope. Despite all the drives that they have promised, nothing is really going on. The only thing that's new is it's no longer vaporware, it's just unwanted.

Once again, we see a good technology that could have done great just a few years ago, but they just took too long. This is what hapened to 3Dfx (my opnion, let's not get off topic), BitBoys (the ultimate in vapor), and many other things. Excessive delays can seriously hurt you in the market. How many of you are enjoying you're Segway HTs right now? That's what I though. They should be careful too.

FINE PRINT: This is all my opinion, blah blah blah.

Re:My View On Dataplay

[kryptobiotic]

Another problem is that the disks are write once media. I'm usually an early adopter, but I just couldn't justify spending over $10 a disk for a 500 MB write once disk, no matter how physically small it is.

I know if there were more devices using the prices would come down but these things cost more than 10000% the cost of a cd-r.

Re:My View On Dataplay

[benedict]

USD400 gets you a 10-gig iPod, not a 20-gig.

Just picking nits, I think you make a good point.

Insider perspective

[pyman]

My brother manages construction projects for Telstra in Western Australia. Over the last few weeks I have been helping him create a damage expense reporting system.

He said that telstra's annual IT expenses account for a third of the total expenses; and because of this the new CIO/CTO is cutting back radically on IT expenses... that means no new software development... therefore he is developing the expense system himself!

Re:Insider perspective

[wik]

That means the new expense system can hide the expense of writing the expense system for only the expense of the CIO/CTO. Fancy that!

Bermuda triangle or pighunting

[MavEtJu]

It's about time Australia got its own Bermuda triangle!

Or the people from redhat.au should go pig-hunting with him (At least they should have given him a copy of the movie Dirty Deeds before he came down [review, trailer)

Nice TTT Trailer

[bleckywelcky]

Obligatory like/dislike MPAA comment... echo("Is it " . $dayOfWeekToLikeMPAA . " already?");

:)

Not Apachne

[setzman]

If you look closely at his desktop, you will see that he is running the Xitami webserver, not Apache.

Re:Not Apachne

[mbogosian]

If you look closely at his desktop, you will see that he is running the Xitami webserver, not Apache.

Xitami has a web server?! (Ha-ha...just kidding.)

[pause; grin fades to puzzled look]

By the way, who's Xitami?

cool.mcgill.ca

[BSDevil]

I'm in one of Dr. Ariel Fenster's classes (Chem 110 - not the one mentioned) and I'ma big fan of the cool.mcgill.ca project. Allows me to watch all my lectures from my bed when I'm hungover on Fridays (class ends at 1pm, wake up and watch around 3pm). On another note, he's an amazing teacher - he makes reasonably dry stuff (introductory Chem) come alive and keeps it going and lively in a class of six hundred people.

Big it up Dr. F!

GNUWin-II Chick

[asv108]

Does she come with the CD as well? How about a little divx clip in there ?

Re:GNUWin-II Chick

[chriskenrick]

I would think that

this is a better choice

Re:GNUWin-II Chick

[chriskenrick]

I would think that this is a better still.

Might be slashdotted now, though

Re:GNUWin-II Chick

[Anonymous Coward]

Another there:
http://gnugeneration.epfl.ch/association/M embres_d e_GNU_Generation/Tu.html

pattern

[djupedal]

Day 326...you receive 'invitation' (aka subpoena) to Congressional hearing on suspect business practices as a result of day 2. Your wait in the lobby rewards you with Martha Stewart's autograph, and a knee to the groin from an angry investor.

Re:DOWNLOADS! *kick ass*

[leviramsey]

Why the fuck should they care that the trailer ends up on P2P networks? It's not like they get royalties everytime the trailer is shown. It's FREE PROMOTION!

Joe Schwarcz

[Guspaz]

Dr. Joe Schwarcz is a favourite lecturer of mine. I've attended several of his lectures and purchased both of his books, and fully intend to buy his upcomming book "The way the cookie crumbles". I hated chemistry class... But he just makes it so damned interesting! Anybody who can get their hands on a copy of either of his books should buy it no question! Or watch his show at the very least.

Regards, Guspaz.

Balmer, Balmer, Balmer, Balmer!

[Alsee]

Look at the monkey! Look at the silly little monkey!

-

Re:Balmer, Balmer, Balmer, Balmer!

[Proquar]

How Aussies have always dealt with big-noting Americans trying to take over our business... well it used to be, and maybe Telstra will have to resort to these tactics to rid themselves of the Microsoft menace.
I wonder if Balmer is into Pig Shooting ?

Re:Balmer, Balmer, Balmer, Balmer!

[JW Troll]

you can laugh now, but i'll tell you -- if I was a multi-multi-mega-billionaire, I'd be toted around on a lectica, borne by 24 Asian babes wearing nothing more than thousand-dollar bills stitched together. I'll flagrantly light fine Cubans with hundred-dollar bills in the middle of your ghetto, and I'll rub it in that I'm soooo much richer than your wildest fantasies that you'll cry and wail and weep with eternal envy of even the smallest fraction of my wealth.
You should be full of admiration of Ballmer for showing restraint, man, instead of making fun of his ridiculous pastime of lapdancing for strangers.

Dispatch Steve = Micro$ft $$$

[Anonymous Coward]

Many years ago, Microsoft bought "Network Courier"(an up and comming dos-based mailplatform - eventually to become known as "Microsoft Mail" and then Microsoft Exchange) I remember presenting a conferance where I told the story along the lines of that Telstra (Then known as Telecom) was the Biggest Micro$oft Mail user in the world.
As a result of them being the biggest, MS built a version of MSMail just for Telstra - as a result Telstra is STILL one of the largest users.

I can't see this as being anything less than Business Cost Reduction proceedures... It happened then.. it will happen again!

Re:DOWNLOADS! *kick ass*

[cheezerman]

They don't.

are you sure?

[Anonymous Coward]

None of the QT porn my friends view on their G4's is stuffed. Are you asking about download viewing or download file transfers?

If the goal is viewing, then there is no compression via stuffit, etc. Streaming is used and works fine (130 per sec for my friends).

If the goal is file transfer, and it just happens to be a QT file, then it is same as for Linux (talking about OS X, not 9.x)...tarred or stuffed or gz'd, it helps to keep the file intact, me thinks. I use OS X, and can't recall the last time I had to unstuff a QT movie.

MS tactic

[djupedal]

Just like buying/selling herion. First one's free, boys and girls......after that, your ass is mine.

Re:MS tactic

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh My God- how fucking orginal!

big drawback

[moosesocks]

Of course, Win95 is limited to 1.99 gbs per partition...

This guy pushes it to the limit - you can't really fit much more onto a Win95 box. Reminds me of the time a dell technician insatlled a new hard drive in my friend's pc. Dell gave him a 12g drive rather than the standard 2gb drive - needless to say, the PC had 6 partitions, and my friend didn't have a clue what to do with them.

Besides, having 24 hard drives has to be good for something.... the server seemed to survive the slashdotting.... for now *evil laughter*

Re:big drawback

[freeweed]

Of course, Win95 is limited to 1.99 gbs per partition...

Only the first release of Win95 was limited as such. OSR2 had fat32, which allows up to > partitions. I ran a single partition 40gb drive under 95 for a long while.

Re:big drawback

[uspsguy]

That comment caught me by suprise also. Especially since I am in a building full of Win95 machines and the one I'm sitting at has no trouble with its 6 gig drive.

bah...

[djupedal]

And since MiniDisc does the same things better, and for less cost, what does that say about DataPlay other than it's a clone and depends strictly on marketing to survive? DP is not unique...how could they ever think they had anything new to offer?

Re:bah...

[MBCook]

Actually, MiniDiscs are only about 200 megs or so, they use high compression to fit a CDs worth of data, while DataPlay discs are almost a CD in size. Still, you have to wonder what they were thinking, taking on Sony et all. "A big giant multi-national corporation who OWNS many music lables couldn't make MiniDiscs a standard in the US, even though other companies made them too; so surely our little startup can do it!"

Re:bah...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually....MD's don't use data (I know, Sony at one time had a data MD..but that thing is not in the consumer's path)...MD's don't store data in the desktop file concept, they receive recorded audio in the form of a CODEC, so megs don't apply....just minutes, in a simple sense. And since the new extended MDLP formats can hold up to 5 hrs of audio, the CD reference is kind of off...sorry...us MD people like to keep myths to a minimum.

But again, you're right...what can they be thinking.

Re:bah...

[caca_phony]

Actually....MD's don't use data

Umm what the hell are you talking about? A minidisc stores data in a format that is compressed by default. There is no such thing as "just minutes". I can store much more than five hours on a cd, if you let me lower the bitrate samplingrate and/or bitdepth enough. yeah minidiscs are compressed, I know that, that is why I will never use them, having a lossy compression on your masters is idiotic (I do not even like distributing lossily compressed material).

Either way, it's a good thing

[Goonie]

Whilst I'd love for Telstra to start using Linux across all their desktops, it's a pretty good second best for us Aussies even if they're only using it as a negotiating tool to beat down Microsoft's pricing.

Why? Because it's going to be millions of dollars that gets distributed back to the Australian economy either in the form of lower pricing of Telstra's products or as profits to shareholders (and as the government is still a 51% shareholder that means all of us).

The next point is that once a few more CEOs see that you can screw Microsoft in this manner, they're going to try it for themselves. At least some (and more as time goes on and Linux apps continue to improve) are going to decide that the Linux option is viable regardless of what deals MS offers, and the others will save a packet. Net result? Less money floating across the Pacific to the money vault in Redmond and more in local customers and shareholders' pockets, and a growing Linux user community who will spend money and use their buying power to get the features they want.

Now, if only Telstra could be levered out of their monopoly or quasi-monopoly positions, then we'd *really* be in good shape :)

Re:Either way, it's a good thing

[petee moobaa]

it's going to be millions of dollars that gets distributed back to the Australian economy either in the form of lower pricing of Telstra's products

*blerk* Hahahahaha (/me mops up coffee spilt by excessive gut-laughing)

or as profits to shareholders

...likewise.

Re:Either way, it's a good thing

[Goonie]

True, Telstra's pricing is a ripoff, which is why it's so profitable.

The reason Telstra's share price is so low compared to the T2 float price is because at the time it floated global factors push the stock price of telcos very high. At the present time, however, the global factors are pushing all telco stocks down, despite the fact that Telstra is a profit-generating colossus. Sooner or later, provided Telstra's competitors can't win more regulatory concessions, the market is going to realise that Telstra is underpriced.

Re:Either way, it's a good thing

[astinus]

I doubt there will be any extra profits floating around as a result of this deal. Even though using Linux reduces the software cost to $0, other costs rise to make it a 0-sum game - training costs for employees, extra tech support costs, the actual "downtime" cost of installing Linux on so many machines, etc. In economics, these things are called switching costs, and they're the reason companies usually don't want to commit to major OS changes; if Linux was truly free for businesses, i.e. "economically free", everyone would use it.

Although Telstra will proably realize some small long term gains from the switch, since they won't be buying any more MS OS upgrades, these gains are opportunity cost profits, and they're small enough to be relatively insignificant to such a large company. They won't show up on the bottom line (read: nothing trickles back to consumers or shareholders).

Re:Either way, it's a good thing

[ethereal]

Switching costs (training, downtime, etc.) are a one-time thing, though. The only recurring cost is possible increased tech support, which may be offset by the generally decreased tech support needs (X admins per Y users) that *nix desktops generally provide. When you compare recurring costs to recurring benefits (not paying software license fees), the picture may be different. It also depends on how long you're willing to amortize your switching costs over, although Telstra could just write it all down in one quarter as a special charge.

I agree that shareholders won't get anything back and neither will consumers, but that probably has a lot more to do with Telstra's near-monopoly situation than anything :)

Get Streambox

[Anonymous Coward]

Although I haven't seen it around lately, there's this application called Streambox that lets you save any streaming file to disk. I think the program itself is illegal, but it's possible to find it if you look around. I highly reccomend it.

Re:DOWNLOADS! *kick ass*

[GigsVT]

That was what I meant. They want it on P2P. I realize my pretty braindead typo of "uncourages" might have given you the wrong idea.

a lotta hard disks!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope he has a good power supply and a lot of cooling fans! He's going to need them!

many many drives..

[morcheeba]

I had a friend that got a deal on some small-capacity scsi drives and bought 6 with the intent of installing them on one computer. I suggested that he should mount every other one upside down - otherwise when he turned the computer, the momentum of all the drives simultanously spinning would would cause and equal/opposite reaction, causing his computer to spin in the opposite direction on his desk.

I guess that kind of geeky humor is unavoidable when you get a whole mess of satellite attitude control system geeks.

Re:many many drives..

[Neon Spiral Injector]

When you start to have that many drives you should stagger the spin ups (most SCSI drives have a jumper to delay spin up for a number of seconds multiplied by their SCSI ID). Not for the reason you suggest, but because the most current is drawn during spin up. Spinning all the drives up at once can actually put a lot of strain on a power supply. Even if it can provide enough power once the drives are spinning the extra load at start may be enough to cause a sag in the power going to the mother board. It isn't just over voltage conditions that are bad for computers, low voltages can also be harmful.

Re:many many drives..

[Porag_Spliffing]

Ì had a SCO unix server (Dual 75Mhz 486!!) under my command at one site and after a little upgrading of the serial card (more dumb ttys) the thing refused to come back up. This was the accounting system and the beancounters were collecting around the locked door getting exciteable while the IT manager and I sweated over the issue. As it sounded like the (4) disks were not spinning up properly I pulled the power lead on one, the boss powered up and a second or two later I plugged the drive back in. Appart from the big sparks it worked fine and the system came up a treat. We replaced the thing with a glorious pentium 100 with external disk box and duel PSUs shortly afterwards.

Telstra, six weeks from now

[Vinson Massif]

In ~six weeks, after Ballmer leaves, I hope to see another story telling how Telstra plans to continue with its Linux plans.

A price break from MS is nothing more than the pusher handing out a freebie. They'll get more than it's worth later by keeping them hooked now.

On the last link..Citrix..?

[JoshRoss]

"...The bank is now deploying a system called Citrix, which turns desktop computers into so-called "dumb" terminals - a move that will save the company money on software."

I am not sure if its possible to save money with citrix. The software costs too much and does too little. It was cool a few years ago, but the CALs were a killer. I hate CALs! I hate CALs! I hate CALs! Ok, I just had to get that off my chest.

Well a few years ago, microsoft came by to visit the citrix household. After dinner, microsoft asked citrix to bend over and well.... We all know what happens when microsoft asks you to bend over.

Re:On the last link..Citrix..?

[Vinson Massif]

You don't save software money with Citrix/MS. The CALs and MS s/w costs are ~equal. You may eventually save money on client hardware costs, but your initial server outlay can be fairly tough.

The admin work is easier than having all those desktops but my head spins at the crap our Citrix admins must wade through.

Re:On the last link..Citrix..?

[mossmann]

Yes, Citrix is expensive. Yes, Microsoft demands a lot of money for the servers. A big Citrix installation can still save gobs of money vs. desktop PCs running Windows, however. Think about the savings of centralized administration and not having to provide on-site desktop support to all the users (who may not all be in a single location). Think about the power savings of thin clients vs. desktop machines. The power savings alone can add up to tens of thousands of dollars per year even for a small to medium sized organization.

Re:On the last link..Citrix..?

[JW Troll]

Citrix is a boon for those of us who run hundreds of 486-class machines and don't want to upgrade just to run Win2K. It's hella administrative annoyance sometimes, but justified when you think how much saved over 10 years of not upgrading those desktops.

Re:On the last link..Citrix..?

[JoshRoss]

Centralized administration? TightVNC, IntelliMirror. If they're running citrix, they probibly have licenses to the Win2000 boxen.

Power savings? They were using old PCs and turning them into termals.

mounting that 25th network share

[aeakett]

Two floppies and 24 other mounted partitions is the max.

Just a little tip... you windows users can use that often unused B drive letter,
by mounting a network share there.

Offtopic... yes, but I though I'd share anyway

Re:mounting that 25th network share

[Anonymous Slacker]

What's the fun in mounting network drives when you can have TWO floppies installed? Heck, I have a 5.25" floppy drive for the SOLE PURPOSE of using drive B: under windows.

Re:mounting that 25th network share

[doublem]

Not Offtopic at all.

Can you also mount a network share on A: if you have no floppies?

Re:mounting that 25th network share

[SN74S181]

Hardware just sucks these days. In the old days you could have four floppy drives. The old IBM floppy controllers had the internal connector to which two floppy drives could be connected, and that big DB-37 connector on the card bracket for two more floppy drives.

If I remember correctly, back in those days adding a hard drive to DOS involved third party kludges. Built in hard drive support didn't appear until DOS 2.0.

Re:mounting that 25th network share

[aeakett]

Can you also mount a network share on A: if you have no floppies?

probably... I'm not too sure though. We may have to try it where I work though...
some of our development crew are running out of alphabet!

Re:mounting that 25th network share

[really?]

don't have a win9X box handy, but you can definitely do it in XP and win2K. I am doing it right now in XP.

Re:mounting that 25th network share

[afidel]

umm why not use win2k or above and just mount additional partitions as ntfs mount points?

Jet Lag, Schmet Lag

[benedict]

There's plenty of Linux talent native to
Australia. At least, I've met several Aussies
with abundant unix clue, without even trying.

No obligatory definition?

[moertle]

For instance, Telstra has said it will consider using the free open-source software Linux, which is gaining popularity.

Where is the line about how Linux is a operating system developed by Linus Torvalds with a loosely based community of hackers located throughout the world?

Re:No obligatory definition?

[sniggly]

and where is the comment below your post that it should really say GNU/Linux :)

Unix is an operating system developed by Kernigan & Richie with a loosely based community of hackers located throughout the world. Windows is an operating system developed in the garage of W. Gates Sr.

I guess eventually some things need no longer be explained and then theyre all forgotten about.

French, German, Italian and . . . English?

[kfg]

From the headline I was hoping we'd finally gotten software in Romansch!

KFG

Re:French, German, Italian and . . . English?

[BassBird]

are you volunteer for doing the traductions of GNUWin, as well as of all the software ?

Re:French, German, Italian and . . . English?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I was hoping for Züritüütsch. That would have been... amusing.

Re:French, German, Italian and . . . English?

[kfg]

Sure, but I think it would be more appropriate if someone who speaks the language does it.

KFG

VMS Gurus

[kaladorn]

I thought they'd all been made extinct by the Tar Pits. :)

dictionary.com sez

[cosyne]

dispatch
tr.v. dispatched, dispatching, dispatches
1. To relegate to a specific destination or send on specific business. See Synonyms at send1.
2.
1. To complete, transact, or dispose of promptly.
2. To eat up (food); finish off (a dish or meal).
3. To put to death summarily.

insert clever punchline here, such as "stop teasing."

Look out for w4r3z!

[nstrom]

The poor slashdotted P120 file server has the Office XP ISO plus serial number, along with other various warez running on anonymous FTP:

ftp://fileserver.coleskingdom.com/WinXp-office/

Re:Look out for w4r3z!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not anymore he deleted it and posted a warning.

GNU Win II?

[0xdeadbeef]

Shouldn't that be GNU/Win? Or, more precisely, VMS/Win/GNU?

This name reminds me of the weird name feud between two towns in rural Alabama.

Re:GNU Win II?

[SN74S181]

Since I have Midnight Command running on my NT box, I suppose Stallman will demand somthing of that sort....

20-odd hdd's = cabling fun. It occurs to me...

[madmarcel]

(And I'm probably not the first one :)

...that it could be a bit of a nigthmare to
sort out the wiring/cabling if one of
those 20-odd hdd's fails and needs
to be replaced :)
Not that hdd's ever fail (oh no, nuh-uh)
but now that I've mentioned it.. :P

(I would have used ehh...coloured sticky-tape
to mark which cable goes to which hdd)

Oh yeah, what's the bet the guy didn't use
any Connor hdd's! :P

Re:20-odd hdd's = cabling fun. It occurs to me...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. But he did have a couple of Conn_e_rs :).

Mr. Nit Pick

Re:20-odd hdd's = cabling fun. It occurs to me...

[madmarcel]

> Nope. But he did have a couple of Conn_e_rs :).

Hehehe...oops :)

Yeah...them things, Conn_e_r hdd's! :)
I don't think he had any, coz they are/were notorious for not wanting to work with other hdds.
AFAIK Conn_e_r hhds only work (sometimes when they feel like it) with other Conn_e_r hdd's :(

I want to know about the power supply...

[gmezero]

Just what kind of power supply does this guy have in the system? or does he have a second one attached? I sure only seemed to see one in the pictures though.

Direct link to full-screen The Two Towers trailer

[fmaxwell]

In the interest of reducing the load on the servers, I present the direct link to the full-screen version of The Two Towers trailer.

Use this link to save it to your hard disk rather than beating up on the servers every time you wish to view the trailer. Also good for writing to CD to give to someone without broadband (assuming that you get the copyright holder's permission, of course).

choice of words

[Anonymous Coward]

5. To send out of the world; to put to death.
The company shall stone them with stones, and dispatch them with their swords.
--Ezek. xxiii. 47.

They've despatched Steve Ballmer? Man, the DoJ really will let them get away with murder.

Not a dispatch of Ballmer

[m00nun1t]

More /. half truths...

The Ballmer visit has been planned for quite a few months, and coincides with an event in Asia. Whenever a senior exec like Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates travel, they always meet with a few top customers. It's just a convenient coincidence that one of their top customers happens to need some extra attention at the time Steve is here, so it all worked out nicely.

Re:Not a dispatch of Ballmer

[WNight]

Yeah... So MS isn't terrified of losing a customer that big and setting a precedent like that. Sure.

They'd box monkey box up and send him off even if he wasn't already heading that way. The fact that he was is simply going to affect the timing a little.

This is good, companies can see that if you want to yank MS's chain, and to have them dance for you (as wacky a monkey-dance as it might be) you just need to discuss Linux solutions. We'll either cut into MS's cash flowor we'll take desktops away. Either will hurt them and what hurts them makes it harder for them to force DRM on everyone.

Telstra doesn't intimidate easily

[Goonie]

To sue Telstra, it would have to take on Telstra on its home turf (ie Australia), and Telstra is Australia's second-biggest company, very profitable, dominates the local telecommunications industry, and 51% of it is owned by the government (which the government is looking to sell so it would not be pleased by any developments that reduce the potential value of the selloff).

So, let's see, Microsoft sues Telstra. Not only does Telstra decide to go non-MS in the future, it starts promoting non-MS alternatives through its extensive ISP business (for instance designing its pages to work best with Mozilla/NS rather than IE, having their installation install NS by default, start streaming content in non-MS formats and thus preventing the usual Linux lockout, and so on), the publicity that such a trial would produce would surely encourage other businesses to look for alternatives to a company that sues its best customers.

That's not to mention what a hostile federal government could do to MS's business here if it so chose.

Re:Telstra doesn't intimidate easily

[pyman]

Interesting point...

Gee it would be fun to watch wouldn't it?

Re:Telstra doesn't intimidate easily

[jhoffoss]

Microsoft can buy Telestra! Then there would be no choice, AND M$ could truly step into the ISP market (amongst other things) and provide the same, crappy service akin to their other products, or Qwest here in the states! How wonderful!!

(Kill me now before MS thinks to take this course of action!)

Re:Telstra doesn't intimidate easily

[Anonymous Coward]

(for instance designing its pages to work best with Mozilla/NS rather than IE, having their installation install NS by default, start streaming content in non-MS formats and thus preventing the usual Linux lockout, and so on)

Ideology/spite alone does not justify to shareholders purposeful increased (customer|internal) support costs.

Re:Telstra doesn't intimidate easily

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. Like the Australian Government would even begin to understand what's going on. This is Senator Alston's domain we're talking about here. The communications minister that would be more at home in charge of Agriculture. The guy that said that South Korea has good network infrastructure simply because they love their pr0n. Please!

Re:Telstra doesn't intimidate easily

[Anonymous Coward]

> for instance designing its pages to work best with Mozilla/NS rather than IE

Oh really? And how does one do that exactly?

The Mozilla guys have spent a lot of time catching up with IE and making it render pages in the way one would intuatively expect (as IE does, for all its other faults) - and props to them for the hard work.

Are you now suggesting that Mozilla has some kind of secret proprietary extensions that renders certain markup more legibly than IE does?

Get real!

Dataplay

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a typical Boulder, CO company.

"We don't have any employees anymore but if you give us $50mil we can leverage our core competencies on the critical path while scaling vertically within our e-space. Plus we can buy some cool shit.

Boulder, land of the stealth Dot-Coms.

but the government is another story

[martin-boundary]

"That's not to mention what a hostile federal government could do to MS's business here if it so chose."

Judging from the Australian government's performance lately, I seriously doubt there's much that they would do. Not only is the budget in deficit, but policiy-wise Howard (Aust. prime minister) is doing anything he can to please the US above and beyond reason. Like offering military troops and equipment we don't even have for the war on Iraq. Like supporting and copying the recent US decisions against various international treaties (Kyoto, ICC, Johannesburg). All because Howard thinks Australia will get a free trade deal with the US out of it, something certain middle east states like Jordan get readily. Hint: it hasn't happened yet and isn't going to in the near future.

So I think that if Bush Jr. picks up the phone to Howard and asks him to bend over for Microsoft, he'll kiss the ground even faster than he can unzip his pants.

Re:but the government is another story

[newt]

I'm sure IT Minister Richard Alston would do everything he could possibly do to help Microsoft...

... which, true to the form that Alston has demonstrated in every other area of public IT policy he's touched, would have the almost certain effect of ensuring Microsoft's downfall.

- mark

McGill lectures require Windows Media Player

[aelvin]

Boo! Come on ChemDudes, give us something more reasonable than the most restrictive possible format.

No they couldn't

[Goonie]

At the moment, the government owns 51% of Telstra and needs parliamentary approval to sell the rest. It's going to struggle to get it with the present composition of the Senate.

But let's assume the rest of Telstra is sold. To obtain a controlling stake in a public company, Microsoft, as a foriegn-owned company, would have to obtain permission from a government body called the Foriegn Investment Review Board. 99.9% of the time such approval is given, but every so often the government knocks back some politically contentious ones (for instance, they knocked back Shell's attempt to buy the rest of a major gas project because it was widely argued that Shell may choose to promote other projects in Indonesia and elsewhere over the Australian one).

Given one of the major arguments advanced by the government for not splitting Telstra up into seperate companies has been that it is one of a very few Australian companies big enough to be a major player in a global market, the idea of approving a foriegn takeover of it seems unlikely.

Linux Victoriesks

[mcrbids]

I find it surprising that many here would consider it a loss if Microsoft were to cut a reduced price deal for Telstra.

Hey, the software was released to the public, to be used for whatever purpose benefited them. That's what the GPL is for.

And, using it as a leverage to negotiate better prices with M$ is as legitimate a use as any other I can think of!

Don't assume the narrow-minded view that Linux only "wins" when it's the only thing in use. Free software was provided for free with the assumption that it might do you some good, and that it's up to you to determine what good it'd be.

If this Aussie company uses the software to negotiate better terms with MS, more power to 'em!

Either way, Linux continues to grow and improve, and "Billie boy" continues to require changes of underwear.

-Ben

Re:Linux Victoriesks

[Maran]

"Either way, Linux continues to grow and improve, and "Billie boy" continues to require changes of underwear."

You're insane if you think Bill Gates truly cares about Linux. He's made his millions (billions?) already. Yes, he'd like the company he built maintain its monopoly, but he could retire tomorrow and live in luxury for the rest of his life. I get the feeling he's in it for pure interest and entertainment now.

The ones who are worried are the other MS execs. Oh, they're rich, but not as rich as they'd like to be. So something threatning their income is more of a concern.

Maran

Re:Linux Victoriesks

[tres3]

Perhaps you didn't know it but Bill is an avid poker player. I read his book The Road Ahead and many other articles about him so I know him as well as anyone that has not actually met him really could. Don't laught at me! Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War to know your enemy over 2400 years ago! Bill loves the game. He is in this to win, to crush his competitors, to be the last player at the table with any chips left in front of him.

He still flies coach so it is not about the money -- it is about the power! Not only could he live a life of luxury but so could the next ten generations of Gates!

Re:Linux Victoriesks

[gfxguy]

Was that the first edition of "The Road Ahead"? The one where he said nobody was interested in the internet?

Two Towers music

[tplessers]

Hey, is it just me, or have you guys also heard parts of the soundtrack of the movie "Requiem for a Dream" during the new trailer of The Two Towers?

The trailer kicks ass though... can't wait.

Tim.

GNUWin II people on IRC

[imevil]

#gnuwin on openprojects (irc.debian.org)

"Your file server, Linux, LVM, more."

[piranha(jpl)]

This is an e-mail I've sent to the person with the 24-drive file server.

--

Hi,

I'm sure you're getting a lot of mail from Slashdot readers. I'm sure a large majority of it is Linux evangelism.

Please bear with me. I'd like to share some facts about running a file server like yours on Linux that you may find interesting.

First, I'll start with a few big reasons you may be interested:

• LVM-the Logical Volume Manager. With LVM, you could combine all of these individual, small hard disks into what appears to be--and acts like--one large continuous file system. You can add more hard disks later to increase the size of the file system.
• No drive letters.

  That means you can have more than 24 hard disks. Linux drives are usually mapped onto the global filesystem (unless you use LVM to combine several hard disks).

  For example, if you didn't use LVM to combine your drives, you could choose one disk for /home (personal settings and documents), one disk for /usr (most software), one disk for /var (miscellaneous program data files), a bunch of disks--one per directory (like "drive01", "drive02")--under a network file-serving directory, and one more disk for everything else not covered (the root directory).

• Whether or not you use LVM, you can have much more than 24 hard disks. If you want to get really sophisticated, you can also spread your disks over a few computers, and combine them from one central Linux server. This is called Network Block Devices.

The rest of this comment is available at this link. Appearantly my comment wasn't good enough for the lameness filter. "Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters." View the original comment as it was entered in the form here and tell me if there seems to be too many junk characters. (I tried changing '--' to '&emdash;', hoping that would help get past the lameness filter. '&emdash;' doesn't work anyway, apparently.)

Re:"Your file server, Linux, LVM, more."

[JohnCub]

I know the guy with the 24 HD computer. He might be a bit too busy to get back to you.

He runs linux on several servers. He's not a zealot either way. He just wanted to see if he could do it using old parts and a windows box.

Slashdot-resistant web server

[ites]

Curious that a P120 should withstand /. so well.
Anyone ever heard of this web server before?

Swiss SunSite Down

[Anonymous Coward]

Mandrake8 + RedHat9 + GNUWin II killed them.

Informative?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha!

Thanks to FuegoFuerte for demonstrating the exact level of technical know-how of the typical slashdot moderator!

So funny!

Operating System of the Gods

[Anonymous Coward]

V M S ?

Sorry pal, you got the letters in the wrong order.

** M V S ** is the operating system of the GODS (aka, OS/390 or z/OS).

VMS was a toy OS that ran on toy VAX systems some time in the 1970's to '80s. Both are now thankfully extinct but VMS lives on in a ghostly halfworld existance in W2K ;)

Re:DOWNLOADS! *kick ass*

[Anonymous Coward]

Go to hell, E r i c.

Never Crashes ??

[Anonymous Coward]

> a superior OS that never crashes

Oh Puhleeeze!

Spare us this hyperbole and bullshit. Perhaps Linux doesn't crash as often as Windows (and these days, neither crash very much if correctly set up), but it certainly *DOES* crash.

Lay off the propaganda and mindless advocacy.

Win the argument with the truth or not at all.

AA in Windows

[Maxwell'sSilverLART]

There is no AA: in Windows

There should be. I know I start drinking every time I use Windows...

kinda sad....

[Anonymous Coward]

But who can fit the most soundcards in one machine? An anonymous reader writes "As a follow up to the 37 operating systems, 1 PC you should check out this site http://fileserver.coleskingdom.com 24 hard drives in one PC. And he managed it under Windows 95."

I know /. is read by a WIDE variety of individuals, but this still seems kinda sad in a way. As soon as this (imho) amazing Win95/disk drive hack is published, people start crashing it. On purpose. Just for the sake of doing so.

Re:kinda sad....

[runner_one]

Well after I updated the OS and no more crashes.
I can not belive the machine is taking this kind of punishment.

Re:DOWNLOADS! *kick ass*

[leviramsey]

That was just plain bizarre.

Last Post!

[alpg]

We have some absolutely irrefutable statistics to show exactly why
you are so tired.
There are not as many people actually working as you may have thought.
The population of this country is 200 million. 84 million are over
60 years of age, which leaves 116 million to do the work. People under 20
years of age total 75 million, which leaves 41 million to do the work.
There are 22 million who are employed by the government, which leaves
19 million to do the work. Four million are in the Armed Services, which
leaves 15 million to do the work. Deduct 14,800,000, the number in the state
and city offices, leaving 200,000 to do the work. There are 188,000 in
hospitals, insane asylums, etc., so that leaves 12,000 to do the work.
Now it may interest you to know that there are 11,998 people in jail,
so that leaves just 2 people to carry the load. That is you and me, and
brother, I'm getting tired of doing everything myself!

- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...

Re:Last Post!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry! Not the last post! Ha!