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

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 :/

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: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.

Not Apachne

[setzman]

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

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.

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: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.

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: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.

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: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.

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.

"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.