I've gotten rid of some unwanted items via freecycle. Alas, even good CRT monitors are tough to move.
I'm in a similar situation as the OP. I've accumulated 20 years of computer parts and can't get rid of them. I've taken some stuff to a ham radio fair that passes by on occasion, but it's a pain sometimes to lug it all up there. Speaking of lug, I've also sent a few parts to various LUG members.
This said, I miss the five or so Atari STs and Amigas that I gave away some years ago. I still have the old Macs (a couple Performas, Quadras, and so on), but they don't hold the appeal of my old A1000 or 520ST.
Tell your kids about the multi-tentacled pasta monster that resides on the mountain... tell them about Balook the Courageous who went to the Mountain and came back as Glowing Balook the Slightly Mad. Have them pass the story on to their kids.
That would be an insane morale buster for the bad guys. Say you knife the Batman -- actually see your knife tear into his guts -- but he shoots his BatRope and BatDisappears for ten minutes. When he comes back he's replaced and as strong as ever, but you don't know that. All you know is that the Batman can't be killed. Maybe he's an immortal?? Maybe he's a demon?? It would be like one of those bunker busters that just completely deflate the enemy..
consider classic works of strong-commentary literature and whether they would be considered SF if published today, or whether they would be even stronger if given the freedom of SF
It could go both ways. Take "Heart of Darkness", for example. You can read it as commentary on the madness of war (think of the gunship shelling the jungle, for example) or commentary on what it means to be human. Tales of human-alien hybrids and Pinnochio-men are the SF equivalents. You could also read it as a re-telling of "The Inferno", which itself is fantasy. I don't think wrapping "Heart of Darkness" in a SF format would improve the story in any way, though. (BTW, check out Lucius Shepard's "Surrender" for another take).
On the other hand, something like Herbert's "Dune" cannot easily be told without an SF universe so I can see your point.
IMHO, SF is not like the fantasy of earlier. It's not "Prometheus Unbound" or "Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass", though they are similar. I see SF as more akin to kabuki theatre or even Greek mythology though, and these forms don't have any credibility issues:D.
I enjoy many of the Pixar movies and "The Incredibles" is still my favorite. Wall-E is second though, displacing "Monsters, Inc." It grew on me.. I've seen it a couple times so far and enjoyed it far more on the second viewing (not that I didn't enjoy it the first go round).
I understand what you're saying about social commentary though. If not handled properly it can be annoying. This may sound like a copout, but I think science fiction has to handle it differently. In other genres the commentary is best hidden beneath layers of abstraction. Want to protest the madness of war in a drama and you make a "Romeo and Juliet" piece that ends in tragedy. Want to comment on the deterioration of the environment and you write about the flower girl that gets sick because a factory blocks her view of the ocean.. Not in science fiction.. In SF the skies turn violent because of pollution. The people wear gas masks. The effect of the disparity between rich and poor are farmed organ donors.
IMHO, this commentary on the cuff is what distinguishes SF. Traditional literature teachers scoff at SF because the themes and messages are so brazen, but it is precisely this "obviousness" that I enjoy.
In middle school we spent hours diagramming sentences, picking out independent and dependent clauses, direct objects, verbs, verb clauses and gerunds, etc.. This was a scant 20 years ago.. (har har). It's depressing to hear that today's instruction isn't even as rigorous as mine was because even then my instructors lamented how watered down the curriculum had become. I took Latin in school, but not Greek; this alone proved to the graybeard loons around my house that my schooling was not quite up to standard. Even my computer science teachers would shake their heads when we had difficulty with the mathematics behind the sorting algorithms. In *their* day they developed the mathematics, not just applied the formulas.
Are we shortchanging our kids nowadays? Is we teaching our kids to learn good???
Years ago, maybe around 1990-1992, I played a text based dungeon. It had multiple players and a randomly generated map. The interface was a cross between an Infocom game and NetHack. Looked similar to Larn or Angband in some places.
Your character could move through the world map and then into stores, training schools, or dungeons. You could also dig pits to bury stuff, follow other parties to watch them covertly, and even submit spells.
I don't remember the name but it wasn't PC based.. IIRC I was visiting a friend who worked at Gould Computer in S. Florida.
I see your point and largely agree, but am starting to feel otherwise.
I am a steenkin' Linux user... I run CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, RedHat and SuSe.. Also run Windows Vista, XP, and 2000... The one common thing among them is my Firefox browser. No matter what OS I'm on, it behaves pretty much the same across all platforms.
The browser has changed. We no longer need seperate archie, gopher, ftp and html clients because they're all integrated. Though in a pinch I'll fire up Elinks or Lynx to pull down an update or browse documentation on a remote server, for the most part I prefer to use a modern browser when browsing. I jump between music and video sites, pull up embedded PDFs, check my email, access my calendars, even update documentation via the browser. The ability to do this across platforms makes the OS (for this particular activity) irrelevant.
The other day I saw this flash/ajax demo that had a first person shooter game. In the past I've seen impressive Java3D demos that launched via the browser.
In other words, for better or worse, the browser is replacing the desktop for many types of applications. As it does so it requires the protocols to be able to support these new apps not only from a standards perspective, but also for security and performance.
Another possibility is to purchase a router that can access a USB drive. I picked up a few of these at a CompUSA clearance some months ago and they work decently. You can define a CIFS/Samba share or FTP and make it available to the network. It's not quite as flexible as a dedicated file server, but works fine for cheap central storage. The only thing I'm concerned about is the heat on the external drive. It can get quite hot so perhaps the lifetime of the thing is limited. Still running for me after 6 months though.
I wish XP would be around for longer. Vista sucks donkey balls. I bought a Dell XPS M1530. It has some awesome specs, 4G RAM, beautiful display, wonderful keyboard... But Vista sucks. Even with the service pack it has bizarre problems. It freezes for 30 to 40 seconds every so often (the mouse won't even move), every day it goes into this weird mode where the hard drive thrashes for hours, it doesn't go to sleep properly when I close the lid, it blue-screened when I plugged in my AT&T USB Sigmatel 881 card, it keeps on bouncing between access points, etc., etc... XP works great on the machine however. I want to buy another laptop like it soon, but not with Vista. I hope this is still an option..
I once got called to help another technician with a system restore. Over the weekend a server had crashed and we had to rebuild it. First thing we do is to re-install the server. This took a few hours. Then we had to restore the data. No problem. We pull in the tapes but for some reason, it cannot find any files. The tech says that he's sure the backups were successful. Even the previous days and weeks had the same problem.
Figuring we had a busted tape drive, we drive 60 miles to pick up a tape drive from another location. Plug it up and bleah, same results. I ask for the backup log. Sure enough, everything is successful. Only problem is that nothing is configured to be backed up. So every hour, every day, every week, every month the job would complete successfully. Successfully backed up nothing.
The worst I've ever done personally was to install a CIFS module on AIX. This inadvertently updated a TCPIP package. This package had an obscure bug that was only triggered with long running sessions. It tooks hours to determine that the failure wasn't related to another patch that had gone in, and wasn't related to a very similar issue related to the connector...
I was thinking (oh god no) the same thing. I've seen some of the virtual worlds out there and they are very resource intensive. I wonder if there was some lighter weight protocol we could use? I wouldn't need an avatar image.. maybe just a label to differentiate speakers. Of course, avatars allow you do express other emotions that sometimes don't come across well with pure messaging.. Maybe we could devise a system of text-based shortcuts to show when the "speaker" is joking or smiling, etc..
The VWs do have features that can't be replicated well, however. For example, I can set my avatar to "Away" and in some VWs it will save messages for me to read later. It would be interesting if there was a way to have a sort of "INBOX" where these messages could be easily retrieved. Maybe allow subject and date fields, and some method of sorting the messages would be useful...
Well, the second was partially a joke... Partially.
Iterative methods are useful in many areas. For example, there are computer-friendly algorithms that can help compute (not "solve") integrals. They are relatively simple to code, and for many functions give good enough results. These methods are being taught a lot more in college now than in my day. Back in the Dark Ages (around 1992), they were mostly given as side examples for further study. I can't imagine someone taking a calculus class today and not being exposed to these methods as part of normal coursework.
As for determing square roots, the "Guess/Test/Adjust/Repeat" is a valid method. There are various methods to quickly converge on an answer, but for the most part it does start with a guess and then adjustment. But though I had to learn it in school, I don't think it's too relevant nowadays. Back in my day I enjoyed learning to use a slide rule even though a scientific calculator was a requirement for the class. Same today. Whether I used a slide rule or a log table or a few buttons on my calculator doesn't really matter, as long as you understood what a logarithm was and how they were applied.
If you're studying mathematics it's one thing, but perhaps for applied sciences it might not matter.
Virtually all day traders and every amateur who thinks they can reliably extract disproportionate gains out of the market long-term (i.e. more than they would by say, holding an appropriate mix of diversified indexes) are fooling themselves into making predictions on what essentially amounts to sheer randomness.
A "mix of diversified indexes" will get tend to net you single-digit returns overall. It is the *safe* way of investing, however. If the markets are up as a whole, you'll be up. The markets tend to go up so this strategy is generally safer.
Return requires risk. If you can afford the risk, then don't diversify too much and instead roll the dice by investing big. This means committing beyond what a typical financial adviser says is safe. There is risk of course, but the payout is better. I'm not saying to pounce on every new startup. You still need to do the research to make sure the company is worthwhile, but once you find that rocket, take the risk.
Your advice about minute by minute investing is true. However, it is a lot of fun to play the roulette wheel and you can get some payouts. But don't bet the mortgage on it. Use it as entertainment only.
I used to work about 10 minutes from South Beach in the Port of Miami. One of the applications I supported was the Remedy application running on an NT4 machine backed by on Oracle database. The app would run for about 8 days before locking up. Remedy support blamed NT. Microsoft support blamed Remedy. So my job, every Friday, was to wait until everyone had logged off the system and then do a reboot. So while my friends were doing happy hours and watching models on South Beach, I was sitting in a cramped data center waiting for people to logout so I could reboot the system.
This was in the days before VPNs were commonplace. At the time the only remote facility was a slow Shiva dial-in that only sales execs could use.
We couldn't script or automate the shutdown because some people couldn't be pre-empted. There were also reports that had to run.
Just pulled it down today via the torrent and got it installed on a Dell Inspiron 600M in a matter of minutes. The previous distro on this machine was Ubuntu 8.0.4 which, though pretty good, works just a little differently than I prefer. However, Ubuntu worked very well on the machine including Compiz, wireless (via ndiswrapper), and even my volume keys. This was the bar that Fedora had to meet.
So far so good. Compiz and wireless work fine. The volume controls don't but I can live with it for now.
Nice things include the on-the-fly res switching of the new X server. Dual head (xinerama) clones my laptop display onto the bigger 1280x1024 display, but it shows up as a portion of a larger desktop. This is the same as in Ubuntu and is annoying. Hopefully I'll figure it out soon.
My other tests were to close the laptop and see how well it hibernates. Works great. Under the Windows XP with recently installed SP3 the laptop sometimes doesn't sleep properly. The screen goes off, but it never throttles down so I've sometimes pulled it out of the laptop bag after getting home and found it super-hot to the touch. But it seems to work in F9 on my few tests.
Those are the only issues I've had so far. It seems fast, looks beautiful, and the app selection is perfect. Price is great too.
I have a neighbor who walked her dog across the street to let it crap on my lawn. I was standing fifteen feet away from her. When I yelled at her, she said, "Sorry," then started to walk away leaving the stinking pile of shit on my lawn. So I hollered at her some more until she went back in her house to get a bag to clear it up. These are the kinds of people in the world.
I don't really blame the dog so I wouldn't execute it.
But the owner... hmmm.
OK OK I kid. People shouldn't be executed for petty things like leaving potentially disease carrying fecal matter all over someone else's property. But I should be able to fine her. Maybe $50 per instance would be a good deterrent. Give it to a city beautification project (like a park, for example) for all I care.. but make them pay something for their disregard.
Either that or turn on my sprinklers when she walks by... Or really loud sirens..
High school was depressing for me. Worst time of my life. Since then it's just gotten better and better. I think I'm happier now than I've ever been in my life. I felt the same last year.
At one point I wanted a job that I enjoyed. When I realized that work is just a means to an end, everything changed for me. Work is... well... work. Sure, there were some rough spots, but I'm happy.
I'd also recommend "Time Management for System Administrators". It's one of the best books I've read and has helped me immensely in prioritizing and scheduling my work.
I'm not going to say that the mere act of installing and using Linux makes one interesting... But, if I were to play the odds, I would say that a Linux-using, no-nonsense person with life experience is probably a heckuva lot more interesting to talk with than the average.
OK, gotta bare my soul on this one (and luckily that's all I'm baring...).
The thought that some meteorite from a distant star seeded life on earth just kicks me. A few days ago the Discover channel aired a documentary about black holes and supernovas. At some point it mentioned that our Sun too would eventually go boom and swallow the earth as some guy sips a drink at a Restaurant at the End of.. no never mind... OK, maybe it will go dark and the earth freezes over. Robert Frost is somewhere chuckling I'd guess...
Now maybe it's all been misinterpreted. Maybe life began here as the product of some freak lightning striking the just-so-right soup of chemicals. Among billions of worlds, maybe life is not the exception but the rule.
But I can't get over the idea of this lone meteor crossing these IMMENSE GULFS OF TIME AND SPACE (said in the best Marlon Brando rumble I could command)... Maybe some alien civilization realized that their world was doomed and they sent this rock across the galaxy to find Picard and whisper to him secrets of a lost world.
Maybe it's a code from some godlike programmer... the Great Woz in the Sky.. The unchanging midichlorians.. sorry.. mitochondria actually some code to unlocking the secrets of the 'Verse.
Or Verse.. like in some Holy Book verse.. Could be a secret code... oh wait sorry, about 4.6 billion years too late...
Sh*t. All I really wanted to say was that I wish I had a space ship.
Depending on how they make this change, it might do well. Ford was doing a similar thing. Apparently they had thousands of possible options. This made customers unhappy because the options they wanted were rarely on the dealer floor. By limiting *some* options they can make customers happier (the logic is bizarre, but that was the business speak).
Now I have a lot of Dells too. Five Inspirons, a couple Dimensions, an XPS to be shipped next week. I enjoyed that I could build it to my specs, but there are choices that add build time but maybe I don't care so much about. For example, they have several choices on wireless cards. As long as it works with Linux and Windows, I don't care. Why have six hard drive choices? Maybe a couple different speeds would be fine, but so many choices on capacity doesn't benefit me too much. Other people would likely hate that they can't choose an 80G, 200G or 320G, solid state, or 7200RPM versions... But for my limited needs the options don't mean much...
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I've gotten rid of some unwanted items via freecycle. Alas, even good CRT monitors are tough to move.
I'm in a similar situation as the OP. I've accumulated 20 years of computer parts and can't get rid of them. I've taken some stuff to a ham radio fair that passes by on occasion, but it's a pain sometimes to lug it all up there. Speaking of lug, I've also sent a few parts to various LUG members.
This said, I miss the five or so Atari STs and Amigas that I gave away some years ago. I still have the old Macs (a couple Performas, Quadras, and so on), but they don't hold the appeal of my old A1000 or 520ST.
Tell your kids about the multi-tentacled pasta monster that resides on the mountain... tell them about Balook the Courageous who went to the Mountain and came back as Glowing Balook the Slightly Mad. Have them pass the story on to their kids.
That would be an insane morale buster for the bad guys. Say you knife the Batman -- actually see your knife tear into his guts -- but he shoots his BatRope and BatDisappears for ten minutes. When he comes back he's replaced and as strong as ever, but you don't know that. All you know is that the Batman can't be killed. Maybe he's an immortal?? Maybe he's a demon?? It would be like one of those bunker busters that just completely deflate the enemy..
consider classic works of strong-commentary literature and whether they would be considered SF if published today, or whether they would be even stronger if given the freedom of SF
It could go both ways. Take "Heart of Darkness", for example. You can read it as commentary on the madness of war (think of the gunship shelling the jungle, for example) or commentary on what it means to be human. Tales of human-alien hybrids and Pinnochio-men are the SF equivalents. You could also read it as a re-telling of "The Inferno", which itself is fantasy. I don't think wrapping "Heart of Darkness" in a SF format would improve the story in any way, though. (BTW, check out Lucius Shepard's "Surrender" for another take).
On the other hand, something like Herbert's "Dune" cannot easily be told without an SF universe so I can see your point.
IMHO, SF is not like the fantasy of earlier. It's not "Prometheus Unbound" or "Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass", though they are similar. I see SF as more akin to kabuki theatre or even Greek mythology though, and these forms don't have any credibility issues :D.
I enjoy many of the Pixar movies and "The Incredibles" is still my favorite. Wall-E is second though, displacing "Monsters, Inc." It grew on me.. I've seen it a couple times so far and enjoyed it far more on the second viewing (not that I didn't enjoy it the first go round).
I understand what you're saying about social commentary though. If not handled properly it can be annoying. This may sound like a copout, but I think science fiction has to handle it differently. In other genres the commentary is best hidden beneath layers of abstraction. Want to protest the madness of war in a drama and you make a "Romeo and Juliet" piece that ends in tragedy. Want to comment on the deterioration of the environment and you write about the flower girl that gets sick because a factory blocks her view of the ocean.. Not in science fiction.. In SF the skies turn violent because of pollution. The people wear gas masks. The effect of the disparity between rich and poor are farmed organ donors.
IMHO, this commentary on the cuff is what distinguishes SF. Traditional literature teachers scoff at SF because the themes and messages are so brazen, but it is precisely this "obviousness" that I enjoy.
In middle school we spent hours diagramming sentences, picking out independent and dependent clauses, direct objects, verbs, verb clauses and gerunds, etc.. This was a scant 20 years ago.. (har har). It's depressing to hear that today's instruction isn't even as rigorous as mine was because even then my instructors lamented how watered down the curriculum had become. I took Latin in school, but not Greek; this alone proved to the graybeard loons around my house that my schooling was not quite up to standard. Even my computer science teachers would shake their heads when we had difficulty with the mathematics behind the sorting algorithms. In *their* day they developed the mathematics, not just applied the formulas.
Are we shortchanging our kids nowadays? Is we teaching our kids to learn good???
Maybe some longtime MUD'er can help with this...
Years ago, maybe around 1990-1992, I played a text based dungeon. It had multiple players and a randomly generated map. The interface was a cross between an Infocom game and NetHack. Looked similar to Larn or Angband in some places.
Your character could move through the world map and then into stores, training schools, or dungeons. You could also dig pits to bury stuff, follow other parties to watch them covertly, and even submit spells.
I don't remember the name but it wasn't PC based.. IIRC I was visiting a friend who worked at Gould Computer in S. Florida.
I see your point and largely agree, but am starting to feel otherwise.
I am a steenkin' Linux user... I run CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, RedHat and SuSe.. Also run Windows Vista, XP, and 2000... The one common thing among them is my Firefox browser. No matter what OS I'm on, it behaves pretty much the same across all platforms.
The browser has changed. We no longer need seperate archie, gopher, ftp and html clients because they're all integrated. Though in a pinch I'll fire up Elinks or Lynx to pull down an update or browse documentation on a remote server, for the most part I prefer to use a modern browser when browsing. I jump between music and video sites, pull up embedded PDFs, check my email, access my calendars, even update documentation via the browser. The ability to do this across platforms makes the OS (for this particular activity) irrelevant.
The other day I saw this flash/ajax demo that had a first person shooter game. In the past I've seen impressive Java3D demos that launched via the browser.
In other words, for better or worse, the browser is replacing the desktop for many types of applications. As it does so it requires the protocols to be able to support these new apps not only from a standards perspective, but also for security and performance.
Another possibility is to purchase a router that can access a USB drive. I picked up a few of these at a CompUSA clearance some months ago and they work decently. You can define a CIFS/Samba share or FTP and make it available to the network. It's not quite as flexible as a dedicated file server, but works fine for cheap central storage. The only thing I'm concerned about is the heat on the external drive. It can get quite hot so perhaps the lifetime of the thing is limited. Still running for me after 6 months though.
Or going outside when the sun is shining.
What is this "sun" of which you speak?
I wish XP would be around for longer. Vista sucks donkey balls. I bought a Dell XPS M1530. It has some awesome specs, 4G RAM, beautiful display, wonderful keyboard... But Vista sucks. Even with the service pack it has bizarre problems. It freezes for 30 to 40 seconds every so often (the mouse won't even move), every day it goes into this weird mode where the hard drive thrashes for hours, it doesn't go to sleep properly when I close the lid, it blue-screened when I plugged in my AT&T USB Sigmatel 881 card, it keeps on bouncing between access points, etc., etc... XP works great on the machine however. I want to buy another laptop like it soon, but not with Vista. I hope this is still an option..
I once got called to help another technician with a system restore. Over the weekend a server had crashed and we had to rebuild it. First thing we do is to re-install the server. This took a few hours. Then we had to restore the data. No problem. We pull in the tapes but for some reason, it cannot find any files. The tech says that he's sure the backups were successful. Even the previous days and weeks had the same problem.
Figuring we had a busted tape drive, we drive 60 miles to pick up a tape drive from another location. Plug it up and bleah, same results. I ask for the backup log. Sure enough, everything is successful. Only problem is that nothing is configured to be backed up. So every hour, every day, every week, every month the job would complete successfully. Successfully backed up nothing.
The worst I've ever done personally was to install a CIFS module on AIX. This inadvertently updated a TCPIP package. This package had an obscure bug that was only triggered with long running sessions. It tooks hours to determine that the failure wasn't related to another patch that had gone in, and wasn't related to a very similar issue related to the connector...
I was thinking (oh god no) the same thing. I've seen some of the virtual worlds out there and they are very resource intensive. I wonder if there was some lighter weight protocol we could use? I wouldn't need an avatar image.. maybe just a label to differentiate speakers. Of course, avatars allow you do express other emotions that sometimes don't come across well with pure messaging.. Maybe we could devise a system of text-based shortcuts to show when the "speaker" is joking or smiling, etc..
The VWs do have features that can't be replicated well, however. For example, I can set my avatar to "Away" and in some VWs it will save messages for me to read later. It would be interesting if there was a way to have a sort of "INBOX" where these messages could be easily retrieved. Maybe allow subject and date fields, and some method of sorting the messages would be useful...
Probably won't happen though...
:)
Well, the second was partially a joke... Partially.
Iterative methods are useful in many areas. For example, there are computer-friendly algorithms that can help compute (not "solve") integrals. They are relatively simple to code, and for many functions give good enough results. These methods are being taught a lot more in college now than in my day. Back in the Dark Ages (around 1992), they were mostly given as side examples for further study. I can't imagine someone taking a calculus class today and not being exposed to these methods as part of normal coursework.
As for determing square roots, the "Guess/Test/Adjust/Repeat" is a valid method. There are various methods to quickly converge on an answer, but for the most part it does start with a guess and then adjustment. But though I had to learn it in school, I don't think it's too relevant nowadays. Back in my day I enjoyed learning to use a slide rule even though a scientific calculator was a requirement for the class. Same today. Whether I used a slide rule or a log table or a few buttons on my calculator doesn't really matter, as long as you understood what a logarithm was and how they were applied.
If you're studying mathematics it's one thing, but perhaps for applied sciences it might not matter.
Solving then and now:
10 years ago:
(x + 3) + (2x + 3) = 42, solve for x
5 years ago:
x = 1, y = 2 -> 1 + 3 + 2 + 3 = 42
x = 2, y = 4 -> 2 + 3 + 4 + 3 = 42
(repeat until the equation is true_
Now:
google
"how old is sally"
Answer:
Sally is an 18yr old brunette who was a naughty girl at school.
Virtually all day traders and every amateur who thinks they can reliably extract disproportionate gains out of the market long-term (i.e. more than they would by say, holding an appropriate mix of diversified indexes) are fooling themselves into making predictions on what essentially amounts to sheer randomness.
A "mix of diversified indexes" will get tend to net you single-digit returns overall. It is the *safe* way of investing, however. If the markets are up as a whole, you'll be up. The markets tend to go up so this strategy is generally safer.
Return requires risk. If you can afford the risk, then don't diversify too much and instead roll the dice by investing big. This means committing beyond what a typical financial adviser says is safe. There is risk of course, but the payout is better. I'm not saying to pounce on every new startup. You still need to do the research to make sure the company is worthwhile, but once you find that rocket, take the risk.
Your advice about minute by minute investing is true. However, it is a lot of fun to play the roulette wheel and you can get some payouts. But don't bet the mortgage on it. Use it as entertainment only.
I used to work about 10 minutes from South Beach in the Port of Miami. One of the applications I supported was the Remedy application running on an NT4 machine backed by on Oracle database. The app would run for about 8 days before locking up. Remedy support blamed NT. Microsoft support blamed Remedy. So my job, every Friday, was to wait until everyone had logged off the system and then do a reboot. So while my friends were doing happy hours and watching models on South Beach, I was sitting in a cramped data center waiting for people to logout so I could reboot the system.
This was in the days before VPNs were commonplace. At the time the only remote facility was a slow Shiva dial-in that only sales execs could use.
We couldn't script or automate the shutdown because some people couldn't be pre-empted. There were also reports that had to run.
It was a crappy way to end a crappy week.
Just pulled it down today via the torrent and got it installed on a Dell Inspiron 600M in a matter of minutes. The previous distro on this machine was Ubuntu 8.0.4 which, though pretty good, works just a little differently than I prefer. However, Ubuntu worked very well on the machine including Compiz, wireless (via ndiswrapper), and even my volume keys. This was the bar that Fedora had to meet.
So far so good. Compiz and wireless work fine. The volume controls don't but I can live with it for now.
Nice things include the on-the-fly res switching of the new X server. Dual head (xinerama) clones my laptop display onto the bigger 1280x1024 display, but it shows up as a portion of a larger desktop. This is the same as in Ubuntu and is annoying. Hopefully I'll figure it out soon.
My other tests were to close the laptop and see how well it hibernates. Works great. Under the Windows XP with recently installed SP3 the laptop sometimes doesn't sleep properly. The screen goes off, but it never throttles down so I've sometimes pulled it out of the laptop bag after getting home and found it super-hot to the touch. But it seems to work in F9 on my few tests.
Those are the only issues I've had so far. It seems fast, looks beautiful, and the app selection is perfect. Price is great too.
I have a neighbor who walked her dog across the street to let it crap on my lawn. I was standing fifteen feet away from her. When I yelled at her, she said, "Sorry," then started to walk away leaving the stinking pile of shit on my lawn. So I hollered at her some more until she went back in her house to get a bag to clear it up. These are the kinds of people in the world.
I don't really blame the dog so I wouldn't execute it.
But the owner... hmmm.
OK OK I kid. People shouldn't be executed for petty things like leaving potentially disease carrying fecal matter all over someone else's property. But I should be able to fine her. Maybe $50 per instance would be a good deterrent. Give it to a city beautification project (like a park, for example) for all I care.. but make them pay something for their disregard.
Either that or turn on my sprinklers when she walks by...
Or really loud sirens..
High school was depressing for me. Worst time of my life. Since then it's just gotten better and better. I think I'm happier now than I've ever been in my life. I felt the same last year.
At one point I wanted a job that I enjoyed. When I realized that work is just a means to an end, everything changed for me. Work is... well... work. Sure, there were some rough spots, but I'm happy.
man.. I remember that.. used one in a IIe and a Franklin Ace 1000 (a IIe clone). I needed it with the Z80 CPM emulator for my Pascal coursework :P
Excellent advice...
I'd also recommend "Time Management for System Administrators". It's one of the best books I've read and has helped me immensely in prioritizing and scheduling my work.
Sounds like an interesting person...
I'm not going to say that the mere act of installing and using Linux makes one interesting... But, if I were to play the odds, I would say that a Linux-using, no-nonsense person with life experience is probably a heckuva lot more interesting to talk with than the average.
OK, gotta bare my soul on this one (and luckily that's all I'm baring...).
The thought that some meteorite from a distant star seeded life on earth just kicks me. A few days ago the Discover channel aired a documentary about black holes and supernovas. At some point it mentioned that our Sun too would eventually go boom and swallow the earth as some guy sips a drink at a Restaurant at the End of.. no never mind... OK, maybe it will go dark and the earth freezes over. Robert Frost is somewhere chuckling I'd guess...
Now maybe it's all been misinterpreted. Maybe life began here as the product of some freak lightning striking the just-so-right soup of chemicals. Among billions of worlds, maybe life is not the exception but the rule.
But I can't get over the idea of this lone meteor crossing these IMMENSE GULFS OF TIME AND SPACE (said in the best Marlon Brando rumble I could command)... Maybe some alien civilization realized that their world was doomed and they sent this rock across the galaxy to find Picard and whisper to him secrets of a lost world.
Maybe it's a code from some godlike programmer... the Great Woz in the Sky.. The unchanging midichlorians.. sorry.. mitochondria actually some code to unlocking the secrets of the 'Verse.
Or Verse.. like in some Holy Book verse.. Could be a secret code... oh wait sorry, about 4.6 billion years too late...
Sh*t. All I really wanted to say was that I wish I had a space ship.
A space ship with laser cannons.
And photon torpedoes.
And a holodeck. Yeah, can't forget the holodeck.
Depending on how they make this change, it might do well. Ford was doing a similar thing. Apparently they had thousands of possible options. This made customers unhappy because the options they wanted were rarely on the dealer floor. By limiting *some* options they can make customers happier (the logic is bizarre, but that was the business speak).
Now I have a lot of Dells too. Five Inspirons, a couple Dimensions, an XPS to be shipped next week. I enjoyed that I could build it to my specs, but there are choices that add build time but maybe I don't care so much about. For example, they have several choices on wireless cards. As long as it works with Linux and Windows, I don't care. Why have six hard drive choices? Maybe a couple different speeds would be fine, but so many choices on capacity doesn't benefit me too much. Other people would likely hate that they can't choose an 80G, 200G or 320G, solid state, or 7200RPM versions... But for my limited needs the options don't mean much...