Or if you're like me and (mostly) deaf[1], IM and email are *vastly* preferable communications channels because it lets me shift the data to a vector where I have normally-functioning sense organs. (I include IRC in the IM heading, since it's pretty much the same thing.) As others have noted, it's *far* easier (at least for me and most of the other people I know) to multiplex their attentions across things on the same screen and using the same input devices than across multiple input devices (phone and computer, person in cube and computer, phone and person in cube, etc.), so not only does it enable me to communicate better, IMHO it enables me to communicate more efficiently than the average person using phone/voice mail would be.
[1] I hear "ok" person-to-person with hearing aids, improved by visual hints (lip reading, posture clues, etc.), but sticking a hearing aid up next to a hard surface like a phone is a recipe for Really Freaking Annoying Feedback. (Yes, some manufacturers have so-called "t-coils" that are supposed to allow compatible phones to work at a distance from your head, but I've yet to find any combination that works worth a damn.)
Just yesterday I brought up a server here
at work to server as a 1.0 TB-range backup
server using 8x200gb WD 8mb cache drives
strung off a 3ware escalade controller (raid5, two
hot spares). The build process was suprisingly
painless (used an athlon-based solution but
that's relatively unimportant. you'll want
64bit/64mhz pci slots for things like the 3ware
storage card, scsci card to drive a tape drive,
etc. the cheapest board I found that could
do this was ironically a dual CPU MPX chipset board
from gigabyte, sub-$200), with a total cost for
a total beast of a machine coming in at about 3400
USD with shipping and such. I'd recommend heartily the 3ware controller cards if you want to try something like this, they're worth every penny of their ~200-300 cost simply for the increased performance and reliability they bring to the table as well as the reduced hassle (the array just shows up as a single huuuuuge scsi drive to linux... always nice when/dev/sda is
reported to contain something like two billion 512 byte sectors;)). I went with a black aluminum Lian-Li case because it has enough 3.5" drive bays to hold all those drives, comes with lots of fans by default (as well as cooling a bit better than your average plastic / steel case due to the thermal properties of the material), and a monster 550w "vantec stealth" powersupply for reliability and the ability to sustain all the devices in the system. Debian stable installed with zero hassle and now I'm just left with the pain of fighting with backup software.;) True, I'd trust something from Sun or similar more than this homebrew thing, but this is also a mere fraction of the cost of something from the commercial Unix vendors, so for the same total cost I could have multiple redundant servers... or more ale-and-whores money in the departmental budget.;)
Re:What about the dangers?
on
Hackers On Atkins
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Do you have any understanding of what a ketone is? Taken organic chemistry? Ketones are bad news, whatever the source, because of their effects on the pH of the solution (blood).
There's really no such thing as a good or safe level of ketones in your system, only what the body is nominally able to handle. Artificially seeking to boost this (thus lowering the pH of your blood, again this is basic chem), is really dangerous.
In the 70s tape worms were considered a valid way to diet (just kill off the worms when you're done, or so the theory went). Bad move, neh? Fooling around with your body chemistry via Atkins is, I feel, just the latest no-effort-required fad foolishness. The way to be right physically is pretty simple and well known, yet people persist in looking for shortcuts and cheats becuase, well, that's human nature. Sadly you can't shortcut or cheat Ma Nature...
Right, well, learn some organic chemistry.;)
No need to trust some random website, any college ochem text will do. Having ketones in your blood will alter your blood pH, with the affect dependent on the amount of ketones in solution. What's the "tipping point" between tolerable pH and the intolerably acidic pH found in ketoacidosis? That depends. Drop below that line and you're, well, pretty much fucked. The problem is that the symptoms of going too far (e.g. the breath odor mentioned in the linked article, spacey mentality, nausea (esp. after eating), tears that sting, etc.) only begin to show up after you've already crossed that line. Once you've crossed that line, you're increasingly risking internal organ (e.g. kidney) damage...
Again, I'm not just talking out my ass here, I've lived through that entire cycle, and in recent memory. In my academic life, I'm a chemistry major, so I have some understanding of the chemistry involved as well. Kidney failure sucks, and it really worries me when I see people casually saying that Atkins is great given that Atkins relies on being in a state that I know from personal experience is way too close to comfort to the hells of kidney failure. (To draw a more viscereal analogy: sure, there's a finite threshold of impact energy required to set off a vial of nitroglycerin, but do you want to be the one tapping on said vial to find that threshold? Once you find it, you'll be telling it to St. Peter...)
Executive summary for the lazy;) : Ketosis is sort of like driving at highway speeds on the shoulder of a twisty mountain road that you can't see well. If you're very, very lucky you'll be ok, but you're also much closer to danger than normal.
Whatever. It's a free world and people can do whatever they want to their bodies. I'm just seeing a future where most of the linux kernel is being written by guys with laptops in dialysis wards.;)
Re:What about the dangers?
on
Hackers On Atkins
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
How about reading up on what "ketosis" does
to your body sometime? (This being the
thing all the hackers^WAtkins-idiots rabbit on about in the linked Salon article.)
I've heard it's pretty bad.
Oh wait, I've gone through having my kidneys die (spent pretty much all of 1998 on dialysis and
eventually got a kidney transplant, 9 Dec 1998).
I can tell you first hand that ketosis
is nothing you want to fuck around with.
Word to the wise, kiddies, ketosis is not a state
you want to be in. It's not a fun place to be.
Want to lose weight? Fine, eat something approximating a healthy (i.e. balanced) diet and hit the gym or go jogging/swimming/bike-riding an hour a day. Anything in the diet/excercise/nutrition realm that sounds too good to be true ("you mean i can eat cheeseburgers breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and lose weight?!?!?! OMGWTFLOL!!!!"), well, IS. Get used to it, TANSTAAFL.
The sadly departed online bookstore startup iBooks.com (yes, before the apple portable) had a search-in-text feature back in the late 90s. It was uber-leet, leaving the sentences containing the matched words in cleartext and scrambling the others in the excerpt. (They had to put in filters to catch search terms like "the" and the letters of the alphabet;).) You can see a version of that technology in O'Reilly's Safari
system (which is also very cool, btw.).
Re:Do we need this? Preaching to the choir?
on
Software Exorcism
·
· Score: 1
... how they can justify working salaried employees past 40 hours a week while paying them less than $27/hour in direct violation of the FSLA...
What did you find out? I'm in a similar situation here (making the equivalent of about 22.50 an hour and working unpaid overtime [they give us comp time but i'd rather have the money, TYVM])
Heh, actually my mom and dad have both
asked me about Linux independent of my
prompting them and discussed with me
the possibility of switching. I advised
against it for now (relatively speaking from when
we talked about it, which was about a year and a half ago, so maybe i should look into it for them again...). I don't have kids or a priest, and my uncle isn't gay, so I can't
provide counter examples on that front.;)
You have to understand, neither of my parents are what you would call tech heads. Computers to them are just tools, and they're getting fed up with the tools provided by MSFT... I'd suggest something OS X based for their needs but cost is very much a factor to
them so a $400 PC running linux would beat out
a $800 eMac hands down, no matter how polished
the apple experience might be in comparison.
Uh, I don't know about GA, but here in TX the state Uni's are raising tuition across the board and have never picked up anyone's tab based on grades (3rd party scholarships are another story, of course). They've even put a law in place that subjects you to out of state tuition (2-3x the regular prices) if you have more than a certain number of hours (which is variable based on program, but easily reached if you take more than one or two elective courses... thank god i'm grandfathered since I started before the law took effect).
For example, as a natural sciences major at UofT-Austin, half-time next spring (I work full time) will set me back something like 1500. Full time is more like 2500. Still not too bad I guess compared to other places, but tuition for a year here is more like 5000-6000.
at job[-3], the packet routing between
$ENGINEERING_LAN and $CLUSTER was done with...
a lowly dual-NIC-upgraded IPX, circa 1991.
this was in early 2000. the same place had *just* decommisioned a sun sparc 20 (circa '95) as their web and mail server.
at job[-1] (left those bastards last fall), they
still had a ss20 in active service as a secondary
dns server, and monitering service server (the
"ping the other services" service).
it's commonly said that Sun hardware has a
ten-year operational lifespan, and given what I've seen, i wouldn't doubt that. it's simply manufactured to a higher standard than x86 gear usually is [nb: i haven't had to herd anything mroe recent than an ultra60 so I don't know what
their more modern servers and workstations are like].
i'll definitely echo what another poster said about looking in research labs for the really old computers. during my experiences at the U of Texas chemistry dept, I saw 286s driving all sorts of instrumentation, and the student labs' instruments were running on things like Mac SE/30s to drive the even more ancient instrumentation. it wasn't uncommon to be conducting experiements on instruments that was predated you by a decade or more...
OnboardC is a self-hosted C dev environment
for PalmOS.
Consoles, well... I personally think having
a console on a PDA is akin to having ejection
seats in a helicopter, but whatever floats your
HCI boat I guess.;)
Unfortunately Slash is very resource intensive to run (I should know, as I help run a site that uses Slash, see my.sig below). So unless you plan on buying a server for each analyst...;-) [I've heard v2+ of slash is easier to vhost, but still... it'd be easier to get 10,000 analysts on an LJ derivative than to maintain 10,000 slash sites.] It's not tooo hard to syndicate slash feeds, but it looses out to LJ in the ease of update and administration. Updating LJ is such a breeze even idiot high school kids can handle it, whereas admining/updating slash can be a bit of a black art. There are clients to update LJ for even things like cell phones, no such luck for Slash, you need a full web browser.
Wiki sites are very cool (I used one as the basis of my employer's internal knowledge base), but they operate on a somewhat different conceptual model than LJ, much more N-people-onto-1-seamless-page instead of 1-page-of-N-people-discreetly. Wikis might be good for internal documentation and final product, but perhaps not so good for really fluid material (you can update LJ from a cell phone, heh). Further, the Wiki mindset is by design focused on the traditional page/document/site model, whereas LJ is much more a system for syndicating content than anything else. That way user/consumer A can choose to read thoughts about Italy, Lichtenstein, and Albania, whereas user/consumer B can choose to read thoughts about the Basque rebels, Moscow Drug Rings, and Australia. Try fitting all those combinations into a single set of pages....
Re:Made for OSS..
on
IT at the CIA
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Yeah, as I was reading that article, I was struck by how handy something like a secure version of LiveJournal would be to an intelligence organization. Each analyst could post things up, works in progress, tidbits of interest, or formal product, which could then be syndicated by other analysts and consumers of analytic content in a fluid manner (NB: obviously would need some additional access, authentication, and authorization infrastructure to regulate who can syndicate what). Further, the LJ codebase would allow feedback on each entry in the analyst's "text stream", or I should say "media stream". And as a bonus, clients exist to talk to LJ servers from pretty much any platform, and most don't require any knowledge of HTML or similar technologies by the end user. The source code for the LJ server system as well as most of the clients is available here but as usual for any outside product, it'd probably be wise to commission a source review of it before putting it into production in a secure environment. (This may be one way to help fund the projects, if possible, by commissioning project developers to contribute to the security process, and allowing the non-agency-specific security changes to be rolled back into the public sphere, analogous to the NSA's SELinux.)
Exactly. It's also very much a chicken-and-egg problem to get into the mainframe world, becuase the barriers to entry are much higher from the standpoint of working on the technologies at home to get that all-important First Job. It's easy to build a $500 linux server or buy a $1000 used ultrasparc sun machine to learn some unix and unix coding on, but... how are you going to learn mainframe stuff? Half of that stuff isn't even documented in the trade press (unless O'Reilly has come out with Mainframe Crap in a Nutshell or something and I just haven't noticed... heck, even the acronym set for that skill area is completely divergent from what most of the rest of the tech world uses. DASD anyone? IPL? MVS? JCL? RPG? OPA? XYZ?) The closest I've ever seen to being able to toy with that sort of thing at home would be something like Hercules or buying a used AS/400 off ebay for a few grand (which isn't a mainframe but a lot closer than a generibox linux server;))
And even with trying to learn it at home, the production machines cost so much and are usually so business critical, you're going to have to really luck out to find a position where you'll ever even be allowed to touch the thing... On the flip side, I guess once you're in that world your job would be pretty stable, simply by virtue of the same barriers to entry in the field.
(tongue firmly in cheek:) Hm, so if I buy things from stores that charge me California sales tax am I eligible to get a vote in California in addition to my Texas one, and get Californian social services as well as Texas ones? Could I transfer from UT-Austin to UCB without losing instate tuition status?
Hmm... this would be kind of a hack, but you could write a "query pass-through" java program. In other words, run a java program as a daemon that accepted queries on a given port and returned result sets. Or it could cache the queries and corresponding result sets, to save execution time. You could even get really fancy and have a pagination mechanism that would allow different "reader" clients to page through large result sets on a per-reader-client-thread basis.
Just a thought. You could dedicate one machine to the redirector and N many machines to the RAIDb, much like putting a cisco local director in front of a cluster of web servers.
old != unsecure, with debian, a big plus
on
Debian NetBSD for Sparc
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
the 'main' distribution is, when you add security.debian.org to your/etc/apt/sources.list, updated with backported security fixes and such. so you get the best of both worlds from an admin standpoint: stable software (as the OP said) known to work and work well, plus security updates. subscribing to the debian security list is also a nice, low traffic way to keep up on debian security things. the combination of these factors make debian a damned dream to run as a sysadmin if you have, say, a huge thundering herd of web and database servers to keep happy.
this is totally pie in the sky, but has anyone heard anything about the original? I would love to see the whole series on IMAX, and would probably go to see the films multiple times which is highly rare for me to do... (i'm lucky enough to live about two blocks from one of their theaters, at the texas state history museum here in Austin)
Slashdot Mirror
jerkcity (webcomic) on kermit's uses
Or if you're like me and (mostly) deaf[1], IM and email are *vastly* preferable communications channels because it lets me shift the data to a vector where I have normally-functioning sense organs. (I include IRC in the IM heading, since it's pretty much the same thing.) As others have noted, it's *far* easier (at least for me and most of the other people I know) to multiplex their attentions across things on the same screen and using the same input devices than across multiple input devices (phone and computer, person in cube and computer, phone and person in cube, etc.), so not only does it enable me to communicate better, IMHO it enables me to communicate more efficiently than the average person using phone/voice mail would be.
[1] I hear "ok" person-to-person with hearing aids, improved by visual hints (lip reading, posture clues, etc.), but sticking a hearing aid up next to a hard surface like a phone is a recipe for Really Freaking Annoying Feedback. (Yes, some manufacturers have so-called "t-coils" that are supposed to allow compatible phones to work at a distance from your head, but I've yet to find any combination that works worth a damn.)
No no no no! "Tobacco Pipe"! It's a very important nomenclature distinction!
;^)
Morning coffee hadn't set in yet. ;)
Just yesterday I brought up a server here at work to server as a 1.0 TB-range backup server using 8x200gb WD 8mb cache drives strung off a 3ware escalade controller (raid5, two hot spares). The build process was suprisingly painless (used an athlon-based solution but that's relatively unimportant. you'll want 64bit/64mhz pci slots for things like the 3ware storage card, scsci card to drive a tape drive, etc. the cheapest board I found that could do this was ironically a dual CPU MPX chipset board from gigabyte, sub-$200), with a total cost for a total beast of a machine coming in at about 3400 USD with shipping and such. I'd recommend heartily the 3ware controller cards if you want to try something like this, they're worth every penny of their ~200-300 cost simply for the increased performance and reliability they bring to the table as well as the reduced hassle (the array just shows up as a single huuuuuge scsi drive to linux... always nice when /dev/sda is
reported to contain something like two billion 512 byte sectors ;)). I went with a black aluminum Lian-Li case because it has enough 3.5" drive bays to hold all those drives, comes with lots of fans by default (as well as cooling a bit better than your average plastic / steel case due to the thermal properties of the material), and a monster 550w "vantec stealth" powersupply for reliability and the ability to sustain all the devices in the system. Debian stable installed with zero hassle and now I'm just left with the pain of fighting with backup software. ;) True, I'd trust something from Sun or similar more than this homebrew thing, but this is also a mere fraction of the cost of something from the commercial Unix vendors, so for the same total cost I could have multiple redundant servers... or more ale-and-whores money in the departmental budget. ;)
Do you have any understanding of what a ketone is? Taken organic chemistry? Ketones are bad news, whatever the source, because of their effects on the pH of the solution (blood).
There's really no such thing as a good or safe level of ketones in your system, only what the body is nominally able to handle. Artificially seeking to boost this (thus lowering the pH of your blood, again this is basic chem), is really dangerous.
In the 70s tape worms were considered a valid way to diet (just kill off the worms when you're done, or so the theory went). Bad move, neh? Fooling around with your body chemistry via Atkins is, I feel, just the latest no-effort-required fad foolishness. The way to be right physically is pretty simple and well known, yet people persist in looking for shortcuts and cheats becuase, well, that's human nature. Sadly you can't shortcut or cheat Ma Nature...
Right, well, learn some organic chemistry. ;)
No need to trust some random website, any college ochem text will do. Having ketones in your blood will alter your blood pH, with the affect dependent on the amount of ketones in solution. What's the "tipping point" between tolerable pH and the intolerably acidic pH found in ketoacidosis? That depends. Drop below that line and you're, well, pretty much fucked. The problem is that the symptoms of going too far (e.g. the breath odor mentioned in the linked article, spacey mentality, nausea (esp. after eating), tears that sting, etc.) only begin to show up after you've already crossed that line. Once you've crossed that line, you're increasingly risking internal organ (e.g. kidney) damage...
;) : Ketosis is sort of like driving at highway speeds on the shoulder of a twisty mountain road that you can't see well. If you're very, very lucky you'll be ok, but you're also much closer to danger than normal.
;)
Again, I'm not just talking out my ass here, I've lived through that entire cycle, and in recent memory. In my academic life, I'm a chemistry major, so I have some understanding of the chemistry involved as well. Kidney failure sucks, and it really worries me when I see people casually saying that Atkins is great given that Atkins relies on being in a state that I know from personal experience is way too close to comfort to the hells of kidney failure. (To draw a more viscereal analogy: sure, there's a finite threshold of impact energy required to set off a vial of nitroglycerin, but do you want to be the one tapping on said vial to find that threshold? Once you find it, you'll be telling it to St. Peter...)
Executive summary for the lazy
Whatever. It's a free world and people can do whatever they want to their bodies. I'm just seeing a future where most of the linux kernel is being written by guys with laptops in dialysis wards.
How about reading up on what "ketosis" does to your body sometime? (This being the thing all the hackers^WAtkins-idiots rabbit on about in the linked Salon article.)
I've heard it's pretty bad.
Oh wait, I've gone through having my kidneys die (spent pretty much all of 1998 on dialysis and eventually got a kidney transplant, 9 Dec 1998). I can tell you first hand that ketosis is nothing you want to fuck around with.
Word to the wise, kiddies, ketosis is not a state you want to be in. It's not a fun place to be. Want to lose weight? Fine, eat something approximating a healthy (i.e. balanced) diet and hit the gym or go jogging/swimming/bike-riding an hour a day. Anything in the diet/excercise/nutrition realm that sounds too good to be true ("you mean i can eat cheeseburgers breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and lose weight?!?!?! OMGWTFLOL!!!!"), well, IS. Get used to it, TANSTAAFL.
The sadly departed online bookstore startup iBooks.com (yes, before the apple portable) had a search-in-text feature back in the late 90s. It was uber-leet, leaving the sentences containing the matched words in cleartext and scrambling the others in the excerpt. (They had to put in filters to catch search terms like "the" and the letters of the alphabet ;).) You can see a version of that technology in O'Reilly's Safari
system (which is also very cool, btw.).
they're both remote administrative interfaces. hell, they're both remote GUI interfaces if you enable X11 forwarding and run a local X server.
do some research before you flame.
Heh, actually my mom and dad have both asked me about Linux independent of my prompting them and discussed with me the possibility of switching. I advised against it for now (relatively speaking from when we talked about it, which was about a year and a half ago, so maybe i should look into it for them again...). I don't have kids or a priest, and my uncle isn't gay, so I can't provide counter examples on that front. ;)
You have to understand, neither of my parents are what you would call tech heads. Computers to them are just tools, and they're getting fed up with the tools provided by MSFT... I'd suggest something OS X based for their needs but cost is very much a factor to them so a $400 PC running linux would beat out a $800 eMac hands down, no matter how polished the apple experience might be in comparison.
Uh, I don't know about GA, but here in TX
the state Uni's are raising tuition across
the board and have never picked up anyone's
tab based on grades (3rd party scholarships
are another story, of course). They've
even put a law in place that subjects
you to out of state tuition (2-3x the
regular prices) if you have more than
a certain number of hours (which is
variable based on program, but easily
reached if you take more than one or
two elective courses... thank god i'm
grandfathered since I started before
the law took effect).
For example, as a natural sciences major
at UofT-Austin, half-time next
spring (I work full time) will set me back
something like 1500. Full time is more like
2500. Still not too bad I guess compared to
other places, but tuition for a year here
is more like 5000-6000.
and more often than you'd expect.
at job[-3], the packet routing between $ENGINEERING_LAN and $CLUSTER was done with... a lowly dual-NIC-upgraded IPX, circa 1991. this was in early 2000. the same place had *just* decommisioned a sun sparc 20 (circa '95) as their web and mail server.
at job[-1] (left those bastards last fall), they still had a ss20 in active service as a secondary dns server, and monitering service server (the "ping the other services" service).
it's commonly said that Sun hardware has a ten-year operational lifespan, and given what I've seen, i wouldn't doubt that. it's simply manufactured to a higher standard than x86 gear usually is [nb: i haven't had to herd anything mroe recent than an ultra60 so I don't know what their more modern servers and workstations are like].
i'll definitely echo what another poster said about looking in research labs for the really old computers. during my experiences at the U of Texas chemistry dept, I saw 286s driving all sorts of instrumentation, and the student labs' instruments were running on things like Mac SE/30s to drive the even more ancient instrumentation. it wasn't uncommon to be conducting experiements on instruments that was predated you by a decade or more...
Alt-Gr, useful when that regular "Grrrrrrrr!" just isn't enough.
(Alt-Gr key example (in this case being illustrated as part of a key combo to produce the Euro symbol))
OnboardC is a self-hosted C dev environment for PalmOS. Consoles, well... I personally think having a console on a PDA is akin to having ejection seats in a helicopter, but whatever floats your HCI boat I guess. ;)
And, at the same time, drive your classmates slowly mad with the sound of your typing. That always helps the curve! ;-)
Unfortunately Slash is very resource intensive to run (I should know, as I help run a site that uses Slash, see my .sig below). So unless you plan on buying a server for each analyst... ;-) [I've heard v2+ of slash is easier to vhost, but still... it'd be easier to get 10,000 analysts on an LJ derivative than to maintain 10,000 slash sites.] It's not tooo hard to syndicate slash feeds, but it looses out to LJ in the ease of update and administration. Updating LJ is such a breeze even idiot high school kids can handle it, whereas admining/updating slash can be a bit of a black art. There are clients to update LJ for even things like cell phones, no such luck for Slash, you need a full web browser.
Wiki sites are very cool (I used one as the basis of my employer's internal knowledge base), but they operate on a somewhat different conceptual model than LJ, much more N-people-onto-1-seamless-page instead of 1-page-of-N-people-discreetly. Wikis might be good for internal documentation and final product, but perhaps not so good for really fluid material (you can update LJ from a cell phone, heh). Further, the Wiki mindset is by design focused on the traditional page/document/site model, whereas LJ is much more a system for syndicating content than anything else. That way user/consumer A can choose to read thoughts about Italy, Lichtenstein, and Albania, whereas user/consumer B can choose to read thoughts about the Basque rebels, Moscow Drug Rings, and Australia. Try fitting all those combinations into a single set of pages....
Yeah, as I was reading that article, I was struck by how handy something like a secure version of LiveJournal would be to an intelligence organization. Each analyst could post things up, works in progress, tidbits of interest, or formal product, which could then be syndicated by other analysts and consumers of analytic content in a fluid manner (NB: obviously would need some additional access, authentication, and authorization infrastructure to regulate who can syndicate what). Further, the LJ codebase would allow feedback on each entry in the analyst's "text stream", or I should say "media stream". And as a bonus, clients exist to talk to LJ servers from pretty much any platform, and most don't require any knowledge of HTML or similar technologies by the end user. The source code for the LJ server system as well as most of the clients is available here but as usual for any outside product, it'd probably be wise to commission a source review of it before putting it into production in a secure environment. (This may be one way to help fund the projects, if possible, by commissioning project developers to contribute to the security process, and allowing the non-agency-specific security changes to be rolled back into the public sphere, analogous to the NSA's SELinux.)
Exactly. It's also very much a chicken-and-egg problem to get into the mainframe world, becuase the barriers to entry are much higher from the standpoint of working on the technologies at home to get that all-important First Job. It's easy to build a $500 linux server or buy a $1000 used ultrasparc sun machine to learn some unix and unix coding on, but ... how are you going to learn mainframe stuff? Half of that stuff isn't even documented in the trade press (unless O'Reilly has come out with Mainframe Crap in a Nutshell or something and I just haven't noticed... heck, even the acronym set for that skill area is completely divergent from what most of the rest of the tech world uses. DASD anyone? IPL? MVS? JCL? RPG? OPA? XYZ?) The closest I've ever seen to being able to toy with that sort of thing at home would be something like Hercules or buying a used AS/400 off ebay for a few grand (which isn't a mainframe but a lot closer than a generibox linux server ;))
And even with trying to learn it at home, the production machines cost so much and are usually so business critical, you're going to have to really luck out to find a position where you'll ever even be allowed to touch the thing... On the flip side, I guess once you're in that world your job would be pretty stable, simply by virtue of the same barriers to entry in the field.
(tongue firmly in cheek:)
Hm, so if I buy things from stores that charge me California sales tax am I eligible to get a vote in California in addition to my Texas one, and get Californian social services as well as Texas ones? Could I transfer from UT-Austin to UCB without losing instate tuition status?
If not, this is taxation without representation.
Hmm... this would be kind of a hack, but you could write a "query pass-through" java program. In other words, run a java program as a daemon that accepted queries on a given port and returned result sets. Or it could cache the queries and corresponding result sets, to save execution time. You could even get really fancy and have a pagination mechanism that would allow different "reader" clients to page through large result sets on a per-reader-client-thread basis.
Just a thought. You could dedicate one machine to the redirector and N many machines to the RAIDb, much like putting a cisco local director in front of a cluster of web servers.
the 'main' distribution is, when you add security.debian.org to your /etc/apt/sources.list, updated with backported security fixes and such. so you get the best of both worlds from an admin standpoint: stable software (as the OP said) known to work and work well, plus security updates. subscribing to the debian security list is also a nice, low traffic way to keep up on debian security things. the combination of these factors make debian a damned dream to run as a sysadmin if you have, say, a huge thundering herd of web and database servers to keep happy.
this is totally pie in the sky, but has anyone heard anything about the original? I would love to see the whole series on IMAX, and would probably go to see the films multiple times which is highly rare for me to do... (i'm lucky enough to live about two blocks from one of their theaters, at the texas state history museum here in Austin)