I learned how to BBS. I loved listening to the connection -- not the screech of those super-fast 1200 bauders (when baud==bps) -- but the whistle and chirp of the 300 baud connection.
I used terms I'd picked up from BBS'ing to BS my way into the computer admin position at my high school. They had a bunch of Franklin Ace 1000's (Apple IIe knockoffs) that I knew how to take apart and put together. More than half the time, just doing that would "fix" the problem.
I was also a clerk at a dingy warehouse, mostly handling inventory updates on 4x6 index cards (the "database" was a box filled with these cards). There was some sort of "microcomputer" then, but not like a PC/Apple/Atari, but with 5 terminals. As a side note, the accounting package did have an inventory module, but no one knew how to use it.
The hours were very flexible and I did most of my work late at night. Every once in a while the boss would come by and say something to effect that "There's a computer problem. I'd fix it myself but it is too easy or too far beneath me as a task that I'm going to give this job to you." Most of the problems were hardware/terminal related -- enter the setup menu and change a Baud setting, change to DECVT52, etc.. At one point I realized that my Atari ST spoke VT52 or some frankensteined version of it. Brought it in one day, diddled with the cables, and soon had a working terminal. The company we'd leased the terminals from were asking something exorbitant for each seat. The cheap little Atari paid for itself after 1 month.
I used this knowledge to land a part-time job at a large shipping company. The interview consisted of troubleshooting a broken PC, reinstalling Windows 3.1, connecting to a Novell network, and answering a questionnaire. The broken PC was easy -- forget what the problem was. Reinstalling Windows was easy. I had never seen a Novell network but I had the disks with the drivers. In the hour long test, I tried loading each driver in turn. Luckily, the DOS mode drivers would give informative error messages about what was missing so I was able to put them together in an AUTOEXEC file. I got the job.
At some point they starting sending me out to customers because I knew what a terminal was. Many of the customers had large mainframe systems talking over Twinax or Token Ring, and since I knew those words and no one else in the department did (they were all CNA/CNE) I was chosen. Learned a lot very quickly. One thing I found out about the companies I dealt with -- their administrators were often clerks who fell into the position or bosses' sons or someone who had a PC (computers were not so ubiquitous then). The administrators actually respected me as a computer person -- little did they know!. The best line I used was "You seem to have a pretty standard installation. Let me review your documentation so that I can get an idea of what I need to do." Take their documentation and READ and READ and READ all night. Come back the next day and pound them with questions in an offhand way (go on the offensive!).
From that point on, it was a matter of reading everything that came my way. Though I started my Unix career with SunOS and HP/UX, I've been using various pc unices for almost 10 years now. I've learned more from the PC unices because I can experiment without any concern about taking down a department. So definitely get yourself a separate PC to install Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD and play with it.
I purchased Crossover when it was released. There were a few initial setup problems but their support is very good. I checked their archives and found an answer to my problem (pugger.so was conflicting with the QuickTime plugin in Netscape). Though I didn't report any problems I received emails from their support staff just to make sure everything was fine.
Performance is, for the most part, indistinguishable from a native Windows version on my 900MhZ Athlon. I understand that there is some initial delay the first time the plugin is started on slower machines. It's been fine for me though.
Netscape *seems* to be a touch more unstable with the plugin installed. There are occasional long delays but I have not confirmed that this is not just some DNS timeout or other Netscape instability (I'm running 4.78... I have not tried installing on 6.1).
That's funny, I took a look at ZDNET (a place I've often suspected of being M$ disciples) and did not find anything really pro-XP. One column mentioned that XP-Home is crippled. Another stated that XP does not substantially improve on reliability, performance, or administration over Win2K. There were very few actual benchmarks (maybe ZDNET was not allowed to publish them because of M$ licensing policy). I did look for performance reviews and most were either negative or said that the improvements were *minor* over Win2K.
eweek reviews show that XP is almost identical to 2000, though faster than ME (this contradicts other sites, however). This edging of ME was not across the board however, since Photoshop and Office apps showed that XP was slower than ME.
pcworld shows that XP boots faster (almost 20 seconds better than 2000) but is comparable to 2K in actual usage. Surprisingly, the multitasking statistic shows that XP is *slower* than 2K.
So WinInfo's claim that other magazines refute Inforworld needs to be taken with a grain (or shaker) of salt. Like someone else mentioned, they have as much credibility for Windows as Slashdot does for Linux/BSD.
Don't remember the title exactly, but there was a Roger Zelazny short story called something like "THe Game of Blood and Dust" that told of beings that played with human history.
We can fund multi-million dollar racetracks, baseball, football, and basketball stadiums, road developments to nowhere, and flights for city planners to Europe but cannot spend a tenth of that on education. In S. Florida, the school board recently purchased what amounted to swamp land for millions more than what it was worth. The promises that lottery fundings would not *replace* former school dollars was broken, as millions that once went to schools now pays for special interests. The Miami-Dade Superintendent of schools is in hot water; most believe it's a political ousting.
My point is that it's not necessarily about more taxes, but more oversight on where the money goes. Miami is very much "I scratch your back, you scratch mine."
But this thread strikes very close.
As a former mathematics tutor (calc, stats, etc) I was shocked at how students who could not add or subtract had made it out of high school. I'm not exaggerating in the least. I tutored several who could not subtract decimals or multiply fractions. They had difficulty with geometry and simple arithmetic.
My elementary school teacher did not know how to add fractions. If not for my parents being somewhat mathematical, I wouldn't have even attempted the calculus. Without calculus, there is no physics.
Anyway, I started a page to help students using tools such as mupad, octave and gnuplot. I gave a presentation on these tools for a local linux group last year and have been asked to do another. If you know students who are on the verge of giving up, have them try one of these packages. It may help with their understanding. My fledgling website is at:
Last year I attended a Hamboree. Lots of ham radio enthusiasts were there with antennas sticking out of their hats, belts, and eyeglasses (I kid you not). They made the strange members of the local linux group seem fashionable in comparison:).
The aisles had everything imaginable: PCs, hardware, radios, other electronics. I snagged a sound card and SiS AGP card for $5. The AGP card didn't work, but the PCI sound card did! I also got some other miscellaneous cables for about $1 apiece (SCSI, serial, etc).
The dupes are starting to climb, but are still less than 5% of the hits. I took a peek at a few of the addresses that are hitting my site and found that the majority are unconfigured (non scientific testing -- just cutting and pasting IPs).
Remember reading in high school biology that getting cowpox would confer a resistance to smallpox? I wished more IIS servers had gotten hit with Code Red I and forced them to patch. On my tiny little site I'm getting over two hundred unique requests for default.ida every half hour. I guess that this is because of my IP address being in the DSL neighborhood.
Lots and lots of the machines I checked have the default IIS page. This may mean that the owners don't know they're running a web server (thanks to default installs) or are home users reading about this new Code Red II and thinking, "Hmm... I'm glad I'm not running a server." I've only seen a small percentage of duplicates too, so the rate of infection is definitely high.
I've bought Win95 and the Win98 upgrade. This set me back almost $200. I haven't purchased any Windows OS in almost two years though.
I've spent about the same about on Linux distributions, since I think it's a good idea to support the official distros. In addition to disks from lsl.com and cheapbytes, my total is about the same for Linux as for Windows.
But, with a GNU/Linux distribution I get a whole lot more. I.e., graphic editors, compilers, word processors, plus just about every utility you could imagine. This is in *addition* to the server packages such as MySQL, Postgresql, etc.. that are a premium on Windows OS.
I guess I wasn't clear in the first example. The door was hidden, and would only be revealed if the magic words were spoken. Once the door was revealed you could enter. So, yes, technically it was password protected and did have some means of access control.
I stand corrected.
So, a better example would be a trick candlestick (or brick) that opened the hidden passageway? Or because the brick/access mechanism is hidden, does this qualify as a "shared secret"?
Do you recall the pencil/map puzzle in Infocom's "Enchanter"? The access control was open; i.e., draw a line with the pencil and a tunnel would open between the corresponding rooms. In other words, the protocol was open. Easily defeatable, but open nonetheless.
Then there's the other challenge/response access mechanism called the Bridge. What is your name? Respond with name. Ok, you may pass. What is your name? Respond with name. Ok, you may pass. What is the average velocity of a... Is this an example of obscurity?
(Note: a DoS attack on the Bridge protocol is possible by sending an invalid response. It leads to complete bypass of access control).
There *are* cases where obscurity helps, and this goes back thousands of years:
Travel back in time about 2 millenia. There's a guy named Ali Baba at a door. He yells out "Open Sesame" and the door magically appears from the rock. He enters, and the door seals behind him. Then this little guy Shabaz (or whatever his name was) happens upon the door. He knows that 41 thieves just disappeared near there. So he searches around. Soon, he triggers the sentinel, a roc swoops down and eats him. End of Shabaz.
Now, take yourself to Middle Earth. A fellow named Gandalf is at the door. Ummm...What could that password be, friend". The door magically opens. Eventually everything you'd worked so hard to build is destroyed, and along with it, your dreams of world domination.
So, yes, obscurity can be good.
What I hate is when some corporate empire uses obscured protocols to protect a monopoly. Oh, and you can't try to figure out the protocol because that would be against the law.
I'll be giving a presenation on RT for www.flux.org in a couple days. I found another book, The Official Blender 2.0 Guide, that's been useful. It has lots of examples, and in general is a good introduction. The main problem is that it seems somewhat haphazzardly put together from separate tutorials; there are a few instances where it asks you to complete a step without having previously shown how to do the step. Like the other Blender guide, it was released with an earlier version (2.03) and there are a few instances where the interface has changed slightly.
Go to this link:
http://www.fcc.gov/cib/
Click the Consumer Complaint Form button on top right. Fill in your complaint. Remember to keep it brief.
You can also contact your local Public Service Commission. Check on the web for the address. Most state laws give about two weeks for the company to respond.
Re:Excellent! All we need now is Phil Dick
on
Lord of Light
·
· Score: 2
During the BBS years my handle was Dworkin. Very few grasped the reference.:( My current nick is still an extension of Dworkin, the mad hunchback.
I had named my machines ghostwheel, logrus and pattern, and for a year used Dilvish in muds and d&d sessions. For a great read, check out _Unicorn Variations_ if you haven't already.
HIs characterization was supreme. If any characters could be alive, his would. But what I most enjoyed were the incredible worlds he would create. I've never had a problem separating fiction from reality, but his worlds were so real that I often imagined myself cursing Stryggaldwir. In some passages he'd seem an Impressionist, in others Cubist...
Telocity has been something of a nightmare for the past 3 months. I've opened several tickets but have had no resolution yet. Their billing department wouldn't credit the full amount of downtime because they'd seen the closed ticket and time had elapsed before the next ticket was opened. Here's the script that I use to check availability:
#!/bin/bash
STATUS=`ping -c 2 -q 216.227.80.37 2>/dev/null`
CODE=$?
NOW=`date`
if [ $CODE -gt 0 ]; then
echo $NOW DOWN >> ~/temp/status
else
echo $NOW UP >> ~/temp/status
fi
They were supposed to call my Noon today but haven't. The next step is to file complaints with the local PSC and the FCC.
A few years ago, when image editing software was not so commonplace, I had a side job editing photographs for a real-estate agency. Their sales crew would load the images onto their laptops to help show prospective clients (this was before the Internet was as widespread). I was hired to remove rust spots, fix broken gutters, patch the bare spots in the lawn, fill holes in the concrete. The justification was that the images were really just to give an idea of what the house could look like, since the buyers would see the site anyway.
A couple of the companies I've worked for do have "fire drills". However, they are not done on a given week, but individually for each employee.
The list of things was fairly involved: rebuild the servers from backups and from scratch; switch to an alternate pipe (isdn, dialup) if the primary failed; run through the restart procedures on the critical systems (necessary because you couldn't just power them back up); plus various repair procedures for filesystems, hardware, etc..
The rebuilding of the fileserver was particularly useful. In one case, we realized that though a system was emailing lots of "successful" messages, the backup was useless in recovering the system. I know restoring is the other half of backing up, but at this place, the job was so onerous that it was rarely actually performed.
A reporter of dubious credential accuses Apple of grave missteps. Without much research, many condemn Apple based on this reporter's article... Some of the posts are a little more level headed and inform us that Apple did nothing illegal as far as the licensing is concerned. Others rant anyway... But how many here have actually contributed back to the community? When was the last properly formatted bug report that you sent in for review? When did you contribute to the FSF?
The only way for Open Source to work is for people to take an active part in the development or testing of the source code. Maybe if more did this, the MacOSes and Windows of the world will become irrelevant.
So the matador waves around a red cape, bull gets angry and charges. Wheee! Watch the matador lead the bull around...
Every once in a while Dvorak or Moody write an article to bait the thousands of Slashdot readers. I won't even bother clicking the link because this is exactly what these people are hoping for.
What you wrote does make sense. However, the difficulty I have with the current movie rating system is that it causes producers to dumb-down many movies in order to attract the teenage audience. I'm not implying that teenagers are dumb; only that producers want to make movies that appeal to a broad, broad audience. It's simple economics.Face it, 99% of Hollywood movies are bland, boring, stupid, and bland. Did I mention bland? Have you ever taken a look at network television recently? At any televised program? Notice the weak plots, the *blandness*? A producer wants to make money, so he targets the largest audience. In order to do so, he must dilute his offerings.
In the case of video games, the target market *are* the teenagers. By adding ratings, I may no longer be able to run down to the computer store and pick up a game because it would not be profitable to stock.
Re:I think we'd have more important problems
on
Rebooting The World?
·
· Score: 1
I know most of the berries and roots in the SE US that are edible. I can make a fishnet from trees (really). I am well armed (Winchester Model 70.270 and 30.06, various.22s, 1 handgun) plus have *lots* of ammunition. Oddly enough, there are several like me in my profession (Unix admin). I guess the mindsets are similar.
The bible was wrong. It was supposed to be:
The geeks shall inherit the earth.
That was nicely worded, but doesn't reflect what I have seen.
I install networks for small business (10 - 100) users. I do install NT for those customers that demand it.
Let's look at some problems with your reasoning:
NT admins cost (at least in South Florida) more than $30,000 a year. You can probably get a very good help-desk person for this salary though. With an MCSE and a CIS degree, $40K is closer to what you'll pay. Add in the cost of the site license, SMS, your mail server and so on, and this figure quickly eclipses a Linux solution. I won't bother with the extra hardware resources needed for a workable NT solution versus a Linux solution.
A Linux admin for $60K? Sure, if she also knows Sun, IBM and HP, and she has a couple years experience. True, unix admins get more money on average, but they also generally take care of more users. But it's deceptive to claim that a Linux admin is $60 and an NT admin is $30K..
As for the remote user machines, I had not even added *client* licenses into the above. Factor that in and your costs go way up. But what difference would it make for the server? A Linux install would be transparent to remote users. They wouldn't have to relearn anything. On the same token, I can't imagine anyone preferring to remotely administer a Windows box versus a Linux box.
I guess it does come down to what the users and company will tolerate. Does a 20 user company want to hire an NT admin or would they prefer to install a Linux machine once and forget about it? Or are they under the delusion that, because it's NT, they can take someone part-time to service the box.
If they want support, I'll sell them a service contract for $15,000 a year (potential savings for a 30 user company is close to $100,000 vs an NT solution). For NT it's more because I need to send someone on-site because even a driver update requires a reboot.
Slashdot Mirror
I used terms I'd picked up from BBS'ing to BS my way into the computer admin position at my high school. They had a bunch of Franklin Ace 1000's (Apple IIe knockoffs) that I knew how to take apart and put together. More than half the time, just doing that would "fix" the problem.
I was also a clerk at a dingy warehouse, mostly handling inventory updates on 4x6 index cards (the "database" was a box filled with these cards). There was some sort of "microcomputer" then, but not like a PC/Apple/Atari, but with 5 terminals. As a side note, the accounting package did have an inventory module, but no one knew how to use it.
The hours were very flexible and I did most of my work late at night. Every once in a while the boss would come by and say something to effect that "There's a computer problem. I'd fix it myself but it is too easy or too far beneath me as a task that I'm going to give this job to you." Most of the problems were hardware/terminal related -- enter the setup menu and change a Baud setting, change to DECVT52, etc.. At one point I realized that my Atari ST spoke VT52 or some frankensteined version of it. Brought it in one day, diddled with the cables, and soon had a working terminal. The company we'd leased the terminals from were asking something exorbitant for each seat. The cheap little Atari paid for itself after 1 month.
I used this knowledge to land a part-time job at a large shipping company. The interview consisted of troubleshooting a broken PC, reinstalling Windows 3.1, connecting to a Novell network, and answering a questionnaire. The broken PC was easy -- forget what the problem was. Reinstalling Windows was easy. I had never seen a Novell network but I had the disks with the drivers. In the hour long test, I tried loading each driver in turn. Luckily, the DOS mode drivers would give informative error messages about what was missing so I was able to put them together in an AUTOEXEC file. I got the job.
At some point they starting sending me out to customers because I knew what a terminal was. Many of the customers had large mainframe systems talking over Twinax or Token Ring, and since I knew those words and no one else in the department did (they were all CNA/CNE) I was chosen. Learned a lot very quickly. One thing I found out about the companies I dealt with -- their administrators were often clerks who fell into the position or bosses' sons or someone who had a PC (computers were not so ubiquitous then). The administrators actually respected me as a computer person -- little did they know!. The best line I used was "You seem to have a pretty standard installation. Let me review your documentation so that I can get an idea of what I need to do." Take their documentation and READ and READ and READ all night. Come back the next day and pound them with questions in an offhand way (go on the offensive!).
From that point on, it was a matter of reading everything that came my way. Though I started my Unix career with SunOS and HP/UX, I've been using various pc unices for almost 10 years now. I've learned more from the PC unices because I can experiment without any concern about taking down a department. So definitely get yourself a separate PC to install Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD and play with it.
I purchased Crossover when it was released. There were a few initial setup problems but their support is very good. I checked their archives and found an answer to my problem (pugger.so was conflicting with the QuickTime plugin in Netscape). Though I didn't report any problems I received emails from their support staff just to make sure everything was fine.
Performance is, for the most part, indistinguishable from a native Windows version on my 900MhZ Athlon. I understand that there is some initial delay the first time the plugin is started on slower machines. It's been fine for me though.
Netscape *seems* to be a touch more unstable with the plugin installed. There are occasional long delays but I have not confirmed that this is not just some DNS timeout or other Netscape instability (I'm running 4.78... I have not tried installing on 6.1).
eweek reviews show that XP is almost identical to 2000, though faster than ME (this contradicts other sites, however). This edging of ME was not across the board however, since Photoshop and Office apps showed that XP was slower than ME.
pcworld shows that XP boots faster (almost 20 seconds better than 2000) but is comparable to 2K in actual usage. Surprisingly, the multitasking statistic shows that XP is *slower* than 2K.
So WinInfo's claim that other magazines refute Inforworld needs to be taken with a grain (or shaker) of salt. Like someone else mentioned, they have as much credibility for Windows as Slashdot does for Linux/BSD.
No major issues. Look in the usr/src/linux/Documentation folder for required versions. Also, check out my rebuild guide:
http://www.digitalhermit.com/linux/kernel.html.
Don't remember the title exactly, but there was a Roger Zelazny short story called something like "THe Game of Blood and Dust" that told of beings that played with human history.
This is what I see in Florida:
We can fund multi-million dollar racetracks, baseball, football, and basketball stadiums, road developments to nowhere, and flights for city planners to Europe but cannot spend a tenth of that on education. In S. Florida, the school board recently purchased what amounted to swamp land for millions more than what it was worth. The promises that lottery fundings would not *replace* former school dollars was broken, as millions that once went to schools now pays for special interests. The Miami-Dade Superintendent of schools is in hot water; most believe it's a political ousting.
My point is that it's not necessarily about more taxes, but more oversight on where the money goes. Miami is very much "I scratch your back, you scratch mine."
But this thread strikes very close.
As a former mathematics tutor (calc, stats, etc) I was shocked at how students who could not add or subtract had made it out of high school. I'm not exaggerating in the least. I tutored several who could not subtract decimals or multiply fractions. They had difficulty with geometry and simple arithmetic.
My elementary school teacher did not know how to add fractions. If not for my parents being somewhat mathematical, I wouldn't have even attempted the calculus. Without calculus, there is no physics.
Anyway, I started a page to help students using tools such as mupad, octave and gnuplot. I gave a presentation on these tools for a local linux group last year and have been asked to do another. If you know students who are on the verge of giving up, have them try one of these packages. It may help with their understanding. My fledgling website is at:
www.digitalhermit.com.
Last year I attended a Hamboree. Lots of ham radio enthusiasts were there with antennas sticking out of their hats, belts, and eyeglasses (I kid you not). They made the strange members of the local linux group seem fashionable in comparison :).
The aisles had everything imaginable: PCs, hardware, radios, other electronics. I snagged a sound card and SiS AGP card for $5. The AGP card didn't work, but the PCI sound card did! I also got some other miscellaneous cables for about $1 apiece (SCSI, serial, etc).
The dupes are starting to climb, but are still less than 5% of the hits. I took a peek at a few of the addresses that are hitting my site and found that the majority are unconfigured (non scientific testing -- just cutting and pasting IPs).
Remember reading in high school biology that getting cowpox would confer a resistance to smallpox? I wished more IIS servers had gotten hit with Code Red I and forced them to patch. On my tiny little site I'm getting over two hundred unique requests for default.ida every half hour. I guess that this is because of my IP address being in the DSL neighborhood.
Lots and lots of the machines I checked have the default IIS page. This may mean that the owners don't know they're running a web server (thanks to default installs) or are home users reading about this new Code Red II and thinking, "Hmm... I'm glad I'm not running a server." I've only seen a small percentage of duplicates too, so the rate of infection is definitely high.
I've bought Win95 and the Win98 upgrade. This set me back almost $200. I haven't purchased any Windows OS in almost two years though.
I've spent about the same about on Linux distributions, since I think it's a good idea to support the official distros. In addition to disks from lsl.com and cheapbytes, my total is about the same for Linux as for Windows.
But, with a GNU/Linux distribution I get a whole lot more. I.e., graphic editors, compilers, word processors, plus just about every utility you could imagine. This is in *addition* to the server packages such as MySQL, Postgresql, etc.. that are a premium on Windows OS.
I guess I wasn't clear in the first example. The door was hidden, and would only be revealed if the magic words were spoken. Once the door was revealed you could enter. So, yes, technically it was password protected and did have some means of access control.
I stand corrected.
So, a better example would be a trick candlestick (or brick) that opened the hidden passageway? Or because the brick/access mechanism is hidden, does this qualify as a "shared secret"?
Do you recall the pencil/map puzzle in Infocom's "Enchanter"? The access control was open; i.e., draw a line with the pencil and a tunnel would open between the corresponding rooms. In other words, the protocol was open. Easily defeatable, but open nonetheless.
Then there's the other challenge/response access mechanism called the Bridge. What is your name? Respond with name. Ok, you may pass. What is your name? Respond with name. Ok, you may pass. What is the average velocity of a... Is this an example of obscurity?
(Note: a DoS attack on the Bridge protocol is possible by sending an invalid response. It leads to complete bypass of access control).
There *are* cases where obscurity helps, and this goes back thousands of years:
Travel back in time about 2 millenia. There's a guy named Ali Baba at a door. He yells out "Open Sesame" and the door magically appears from the rock. He enters, and the door seals behind him. Then this little guy Shabaz (or whatever his name was) happens upon the door. He knows that 41 thieves just disappeared near there. So he searches around. Soon, he triggers the sentinel, a roc swoops down and eats him. End of Shabaz.
Now, take yourself to Middle Earth. A fellow named Gandalf is at the door. Ummm...What could that password be, friend". The door magically opens. Eventually everything you'd worked so hard to build is destroyed, and along with it, your dreams of world domination.
So, yes, obscurity can be good.
What I hate is when some corporate empire uses obscured protocols to protect a monopoly. Oh, and you can't try to figure out the protocol because that would be against the law.
I'll be giving a presenation on RT for www.flux.org in a couple days. I found another book, The Official Blender 2.0 Guide, that's been useful. It has lots of examples, and in general is a good introduction. The main problem is that it seems somewhat haphazzardly put together from separate tutorials; there are a few instances where it asks you to complete a step without having previously shown how to do the step. Like the other Blender guide, it was released with an earlier version (2.03) and there are a few instances where the interface has changed slightly.
Go to this link:
http://www.fcc.gov/cib/
Click the Consumer Complaint Form button on top right. Fill in your complaint. Remember to keep it brief.
You can also contact your local Public Service Commission. Check on the web for the address. Most state laws give about two weeks for the company to respond.
During the BBS years my handle was Dworkin. Very few grasped the reference. :( My current nick is still an extension of Dworkin, the mad hunchback.
I had named my machines ghostwheel, logrus and pattern, and for a year used Dilvish in muds and d&d sessions. For a great read, check out _Unicorn Variations_ if you haven't already.
HIs characterization was supreme. If any characters could be alive, his would. But what I most enjoyed were the incredible worlds he would create. I've never had a problem separating fiction from reality, but his worlds were so real that I often imagined myself cursing Stryggaldwir. In some passages he'd seem an Impressionist, in others Cubist...
Telocity has been something of a nightmare for the past 3 months. I've opened several tickets but have had no resolution yet. Their billing department wouldn't credit the full amount of downtime because they'd seen the closed ticket and time had elapsed before the next ticket was opened. Here's the script that I use to check availability:
#!/bin/bash STATUS=`ping -c 2 -q 216.227.80.37 2>/dev/null`
CODE=$?
NOW=`date`
if [ $CODE -gt 0 ]; then
echo $NOW DOWN >> ~/temp/status
else
echo $NOW UP >> ~/temp/status
fi
They were supposed to call my Noon today but haven't. The next step is to file complaints with the local PSC and the FCC.
A few years ago, when image editing software was not so commonplace, I had a side job editing photographs for a real-estate agency. Their sales crew would load the images onto their laptops to help show prospective clients (this was before the Internet was as widespread). I was hired to remove rust spots, fix broken gutters, patch the bare spots in the lawn, fill holes in the concrete. The justification was that the images were really just to give an idea of what the house could look like, since the buyers would see the site anyway.
The same drill can also be applied to memory leaks. It does not work for core dumps.
The list of things was fairly involved: rebuild the servers from backups and from scratch; switch to an alternate pipe (isdn, dialup) if the primary failed; run through the restart procedures on the critical systems (necessary because you couldn't just power them back up); plus various repair procedures for filesystems, hardware, etc..
The rebuilding of the fileserver was particularly useful. In one case, we realized that though a system was emailing lots of "successful" messages, the backup was useless in recovering the system. I know restoring is the other half of backing up, but at this place, the job was so onerous that it was rarely actually performed.
A reporter of dubious credential accuses Apple of grave missteps. Without much research, many condemn Apple based on this reporter's article... Some of the posts are a little more level headed and inform us that Apple did nothing illegal as far as the licensing is concerned. Others rant anyway... But how many here have actually contributed back to the community? When was the last properly formatted bug report that you sent in for review? When did you contribute to the FSF?
The only way for Open Source to work is for people to take an active part in the development or testing of the source code. Maybe if more did this, the MacOSes and Windows of the world will become irrelevant.
So the matador waves around a red cape, bull gets angry and charges. Wheee! Watch the matador lead the bull around...
Every once in a while Dvorak or Moody write an article to bait the thousands of Slashdot readers. I won't even bother clicking the link because this is exactly what these people are hoping for.
http://www.digitalhermit.com/linux/kernel.html
I just installed 2.4.3 on RedHat 6.2 using these procedures.
What you wrote does make sense. However, the difficulty I have with the current movie rating system is that it causes producers to dumb-down many movies in order to attract the teenage audience. I'm not implying that teenagers are dumb; only that producers want to make movies that appeal to a broad, broad audience. It's simple economics.Face it, 99% of Hollywood movies are bland, boring, stupid, and bland. Did I mention bland? Have you ever taken a look at network television recently? At any televised program? Notice the weak plots, the *blandness*? A producer wants to make money, so he targets the largest audience. In order to do so, he must dilute his offerings.
In the case of video games, the target market *are* the teenagers. By adding ratings, I may no longer be able to run down to the computer store and pick up a game because it would not be profitable to stock.
I know most of the berries and roots in the SE US that are edible. I can make a fishnet from trees (really). I am well armed (Winchester Model 70 .270 and 30.06, various .22s, 1 handgun) plus have *lots* of ammunition. Oddly enough, there are several like me in my profession (Unix admin). I guess the mindsets are similar.
The bible was wrong. It was supposed to be:
The geeks shall inherit the earth.
I install networks for small business (10 - 100) users. I do install NT for those customers that demand it.
Let's look at some problems with your reasoning:
NT admins cost (at least in South Florida) more than $30,000 a year. You can probably get a very good help-desk person for this salary though. With an MCSE and a CIS degree, $40K is closer to what you'll pay. Add in the cost of the site license, SMS, your mail server and so on, and this figure quickly eclipses a Linux solution. I won't bother with the extra hardware resources needed for a workable NT solution versus a Linux solution.
A Linux admin for $60K? Sure, if she also knows Sun, IBM and HP, and she has a couple years experience. True, unix admins get more money on average, but they also generally take care of more users. But it's deceptive to claim that a Linux admin is $60 and an NT admin is $30K..
As for the remote user machines, I had not even added *client* licenses into the above. Factor that in and your costs go way up. But what difference would it make for the server? A Linux install would be transparent to remote users. They wouldn't have to relearn anything. On the same token, I can't imagine anyone preferring to remotely administer a Windows box versus a Linux box.
I guess it does come down to what the users and company will tolerate. Does a 20 user company want to hire an NT admin or would they prefer to install a Linux machine once and forget about it? Or are they under the delusion that, because it's NT, they can take someone part-time to service the box.
If they want support, I'll sell them a service contract for $15,000 a year (potential savings for a 30 user company is close to $100,000 vs an NT solution). For NT it's more because I need to send someone on-site because even a driver update requires a reboot.