I used dual monitor CAD in college on a MicroVAX ~ 1987. You could run Calma or IDEAS. The system also had a tablet.
My college had 4 stations, but you could use a Tektronix 4010 terminal emulator (over 9600 baud or even 1200!) to get some extra seat time if they were busy.
Yeah, we prefered CAD that could run on our 8088 systems....
Not how to use one copy of bookmarks on multiple browsers.
I use mozilla on multiple computers. My linux laptop at home. My wife's XP laptop. My linux desktop at work. My Macintosh at work. All running mozilla. Forget other platforms for now.
I want to be able to bookmark -> bookmark this page on any one of these and have it show up on all the other browsers from the Bookmarks tab. With my catagories, etc.
I've used a perl script (bookmark merge?) to sync netscape/mozilla bookmarks. It's a pain.
I want sync to work like my palm pilot. I sync to jpilot at home and work. To iSync and to Windows PalmDesktop. I've synced it to an exchange server, Evolution and Lotus Notes. Changes in one propogate to all the others.
I have an app that copies the palm to the cell phone. Any time I update the palm I can reimport and copy over the cell phone. This will wipe out anything in the phone, erasing what's there. I could copy the cell data to the palm stuff, but it would be a duplicate to what's there.
This means I have to maintain & manually sync 2 sets of data in 2 locations. This is fine for small amounts of data in a small number of locations. My bookmarks.html file is 250k.
I want something like palm syncing for Mozilla bookmarks. Anything less is half way.
It's ironic that they remove the serial port and keep the parallel port. Most printers nowadays have a USB port. Most serial things only have serial.
So now you have a useless parallel port and have to lug around a USB-serial adapter. Well, if you have serial stuff to connect to. I do: GPS, Datalink laptop adapter, serial terminal to sun workstations, probably some I forgot.
Next on the list to remove: PCMCIA. I use it to get a working modem under linux and a resetable one under windows. I also have scsi to pcmcia, ethernet. IDE to pcmcia. Wifi. CF reader. Most of these can be replaced by a USB adapter.
I find when I ride my motorcycle, I'm much more focused then in the car.
a) no stereo b) much better visibility c) paranoia about other drivers
When I'm in the car, I find a phone not to be distracting as long as it's hand's free.
On the bike, my left hand runs the clutch, left foot the shifter, right foot the rear brakes and the right hand runs the throttle *and* the front brake. The rear brake isn't that importent as the front brake gives 70-90% of your braking.
I also run the blinkers from my left hand. No self cancelling either.
When I get in the car I have lots of extra bandwith for the cell phone. But most people are not tuned to handle the motorcycle....
Anyone can admin 1-30 machines. p to 40 if you're dedicated. Admining 100 with active users is a whole different mindset. If you do it right, adding another 100 doesn't signifigantly increase the workload.
Ok, there's lots of assumptions here, but my point is that adminin a firewall, mail server, website, fileserver network at home for your family not the same as doing it for a department or business.
Many users who run the above at home don't realize this.
The file server is low on space. At home, go to the store & grab a 200GB IDE & problem solved. At work, it's got RAID. It might be SCSI. All the ports are full & a new controller might be needed. Some user is throwing their personal MP3s up impacting other users.
Maybe your IDE costs $0.50/GB, but my high speed SCSI RAID drive w/ dual power doesn't. And management wants it up 24x7 with backups in case there's a hiccup.
I guess a good analogy would be a backyard car mechanic vs a fleet mechanic for trucking. Whole different mind set.
As a sysadmin, I expect the company to pay for my cell phone/pager. I expect a decent computer to use. I expect to be able to get pens, paper, whiteboards, etc.
Now, imagine you're a plumber. You need to supply your own tools. There's about $1000 or so worth. The company might If you don't have a master license, you need to work as an apprentice for less pay with a master plumber. I think it takes 7 years to become a master plumber. If you switch jobs, you'll probably have to start over.
You're expected to wear steel toed boots. Most companies don't pay for that either. Are you working outside in the rain? Better get a raincoat! Cold & snowy? Get a parka. Because the company ain't getting those either.
Substitute electrician, HVAC for plumber above also.
If you're not the one driving the company truck, you have to get to the job site too. That might be the same for weeks or it might be 2-3 different places in a week.
Office workers have it easy.
That being said, if I had to supply my own computer, cell phone, pager, etc, I'd expect to be paid more. But I'm glad I didn't have to apprentice for 7 years before I could work w/o supervision....
*sigh* I started a new job today. They gave me a laptop someone had before w. win2k on it. I got it at 10am.
Windows Update had 30 critical updates. That took most of the day plus multiple reboots. A driver update for the video card took my 1280x1024x24bit screen to 640x480x4 (16 colors?) so I had to seek that out from the vendor.
I had to download Mozilla - IE is disrecommended by DHS and CERT you know.
At times, during the day, it would take 2 minutes to respond to a mouse click.
It wasn't until 4pm when cygwin finished installing that I got my ssh pipe to home email going.
IM? gaim installed in seconds. Just like on Mandrake 10 or Redhat 9 or Fedora Core 1. I haven't played with Suse yet.
As soon as I figure out what I need to connect to & how to do it in linux, that laptop is getting formatted. I could've installed a nicely working Linux on it in an hour.
And *LIE* to the websites that say they only work w/ IE on XP. Tell them you're running IE on XP, not Mozilla on Linux. Most of them will work anyways.
if as many man-hours were spent improving Minix as were spent improving Linux, who is to say which would be the best today.
Minix got quite a bit of man hours in the early days. comp.os.minix was the busiest newsgroup going until linux got fairly established.
What really held minix back:
1) The license. You had to buy it, then you could apply patches to modify the code. You could not distribute modified code. Just patches.
2) Lack of central authority for development. AST wasn't interested in developing Minix beyond a teaching tool. Kudos for him to stand his ground against all the pressure. The license kinda prevented anyone else from taking up the role either.
3) 8086 and 80286 limiting code to 64k code + 64k data. Minix-386 didn't have this limit. But 386s were expensive. Also, because of the license, Minix-386 was a series of patches...
4) Tools! With the data limit and a kernel that's very different from most Unixen, most tools couldn't be ported. Not vi, but elvis worked. No ksh/csh, just a bourne shell clone. Not awk, but a similar one. No GNU tools. Kermit worked on the 808x but was too big to compile. It needed to be cross compiled on the 386.
5) Linus, frustrated with the above limitations and wanting a real unix to run GNU stuff on and wanting to play w/ 386 code started Linux and released his work.
6) Linux fixed the problems Minix had for adoption. The license, central development, large memory access. That made it possible for others to easily share thier work and support GNU.
7) Linux aimed at making it easy to port GNU & other stuff to Linux. He wanted to develop the kernel, not the shell, editor, compiler, etc.
Mst of us using Minux just wanted to use the Unix environment. Minix was $100 vs $1000 for commercial Unix (SCO, Interactive, ummmm).
Minix had many of the same limits as DOS. Heck, I had GNU tools in DOS and editors that handled >64k files. Minix didn't. Linux did.
It also worked on my computer which 386BSD didn't. That also had a lack of central development until FreeBSD started. If Linux had come along a few years later, most people would probably be running FreeBSD instead.
Look at MotoGP motorcycle racing. Less then 500lbs with 220HP. They're also narrow enoug that passing is common. Not just once a lap, but sometimes in successive corners.
Bikes also have that kind of deceleration & acceleration.
Obviously you don't understand what syncing is about.
I keep all my addresses and schedule in my pilot. I carry it with me to the Dr, etc.
I keep all the data in my computer which is too big to carry with me. I can even sync to my wife's computer so she can see my schedule & addresses.
I sync the phone list to my phone so I don't have to use the keypad to enter them yet again. If a phone can't sync, I won't buy it. With syncing, I can also push those phone numbers back up to the computer & PDA.
I grew up w/ DOS and learned C, AWK, Gnuplot, vi and emacs on DOS. I used MacOS 7 and Windows 3.1 I played with Minix but kept hitting its limits. I tried OS/2 and did the same thing. Finally I installed Linux after 386BSD failed to install.
Linux did everything I wanted w/o the memory limits. I could run GNU emacs instead of microemacs. I had a nice programmable shell.
And I could make the GUI do what I wanted when I needed a GUI. Some things are better in a GUI but it's hard to script.
I've used Win 98, NT 4, XP and MacOS X. I don't like the GUI. If you need to track dozens of systems (I'll have ~ 80 windows open), the single user model doesn't work.
I can change the GUI to suit my needs and use an integrated workspace manager. None of the others does that.
Oh yeah, having networkable graphics is nice too. I can run a CPU intensive thing on the fast server & display the GUI back to my desktop.
If you really want a firewall, don't put anything on it besides a firewall.
A 486 makes a nice firewall for a home user. Just about any cast off PC will do. That P3 500MHz is more then enough for a business's T1 with complicated FW rules and VPNs.
If you ask me, the only answer to the music problem is a decentralized means of producing music, like ardour or, for the not-so-hungry college student, protools, and a centralized means of conveyance like CD Baby or audiolunchbox. Artists know how they want their music to sound. Record company hired slag producers do not.
I listen to Folk music. (http://www.wumb.org for a live stream). During the 60's Folk was popular w/ Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Janis Ian and a host of others. Enough that record companies picked up many Folk artists.
In the 80's, the big companies dropped Folk for the most part. It's all small potatoes nowadays as the fad has passed. But the artists went to smaller labels. Some started to self produce. In the end, most of the folk scene barely missed the big label's influences.
CD-R has done alot for the singer songwriters. Probably more then cassette tapes did for the previous generation. It's easy to make an album & put it on CDs to sell at concerts w/o any label being involved. And you can make a living at it.
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I used dual monitor CAD in college on a MicroVAX ~ 1987. You could run Calma or IDEAS. The system also had a tablet.
My college had 4 stations, but you could use a Tektronix 4010 terminal emulator (over 9600 baud or even 1200!) to get some extra seat time if they were busy.
Yeah, we prefered CAD that could run on our 8088 systems....
The insurance co says we'll pay $xx for the procedure. Hospitals either accept it or else get no customers with that insurance agency.
The question is there a way to sync.
Not how to use one copy of bookmarks on multiple browsers.
I use mozilla on multiple computers. My linux laptop at home. My wife's XP laptop. My linux desktop at work. My Macintosh at work. All running mozilla. Forget other platforms for now.
I want to be able to bookmark -> bookmark this page on any one of these and have it show up on all the other browsers from the Bookmarks tab. With my catagories, etc.
I've used a perl script (bookmark merge?) to sync netscape/mozilla bookmarks. It's a pain.
I want sync to work like my palm pilot. I sync to jpilot at home and work. To iSync and to Windows PalmDesktop. I've synced it to an exchange server, Evolution and Lotus Notes. Changes in one propogate to all the others.
I have an app that copies the palm to the cell phone. Any time I update the palm I can reimport and copy over the cell phone. This will wipe out anything in the phone, erasing what's there. I could copy the cell data to the palm stuff, but it would be a duplicate to what's there.
This means I have to maintain & manually sync 2 sets of data in 2 locations. This is fine for small amounts of data in a small number of locations. My bookmarks.html file is 250k.
I want something like palm syncing for Mozilla bookmarks. Anything less is half way.
It's ironic that they remove the serial port and keep the parallel port. Most printers nowadays have a USB port. Most serial things only have serial.
So now you have a useless parallel port and have to lug around a USB-serial adapter. Well, if you have serial stuff to connect to. I do: GPS, Datalink laptop adapter, serial terminal to sun workstations, probably some I forgot.
Next on the list to remove: PCMCIA. I use it to get a working modem under linux and a resetable one under windows. I also have scsi to pcmcia, ethernet. IDE to pcmcia. Wifi. CF reader. Most of these can be replaced by a USB adapter.
I find when I ride my motorcycle, I'm much more focused then in the car.
a) no stereo
b) much better visibility
c) paranoia about other drivers
When I'm in the car, I find a phone not to be distracting as long as it's hand's free.
On the bike, my left hand runs the clutch, left foot the shifter, right foot the rear brakes and the right hand runs the throttle *and* the front brake. The rear brake isn't that importent as the front brake gives 70-90% of your braking.
I also run the blinkers from my left hand. No self cancelling either.
When I get in the car I have lots of extra bandwith for the cell phone. But most people are not tuned to handle the motorcycle....
Anyone can admin 1-30 machines. p to 40 if you're dedicated. Admining 100 with active users is a whole different mindset. If you do it right, adding another 100 doesn't signifigantly increase the workload.
Ok, there's lots of assumptions here, but my point is that adminin a firewall, mail server, website, fileserver network at home for your family not the same as doing it for a department or business.
Many users who run the above at home don't realize this.
The file server is low on space. At home, go to the store & grab a 200GB IDE & problem solved. At work, it's got RAID. It might be SCSI. All the ports are full & a new controller might be needed. Some user is throwing their personal MP3s up impacting other users.
Maybe your IDE costs $0.50/GB, but my high speed SCSI RAID drive w/ dual power doesn't. And management wants it up 24x7 with backups in case there's a hiccup.
I guess a good analogy would be a backyard car mechanic vs a fleet mechanic for trucking. Whole different mind set.
As a sysadmin, I expect the company to pay for my cell phone/pager. I expect a decent computer to use. I expect to be able to get pens, paper, whiteboards, etc.
Now, imagine you're a plumber. You need to supply your own tools. There's about $1000 or so worth. The company might If you don't have a master license, you need to work as an apprentice for less pay with a master plumber. I think it takes 7 years to become a master plumber. If you switch jobs, you'll probably have to start over.
You're expected to wear steel toed boots. Most companies don't pay for that either. Are you working outside in the rain? Better get a raincoat! Cold & snowy? Get a parka. Because the company ain't getting those either.
Substitute electrician, HVAC for plumber above also.
If you're not the one driving the company truck, you have to get to the job site too. That might be the same for weeks or it might be 2-3 different places in a week.
Office workers have it easy.
That being said, if I had to supply my own computer, cell phone, pager, etc, I'd expect to be paid more. But I'm glad I didn't have to apprentice for 7 years before I could work w/o supervision....
*sigh* I started a new job today. They gave me a laptop someone had before w. win2k on it. I got it at 10am.
Windows Update had 30 critical updates. That took most of the day plus multiple reboots. A driver update for the video card took my 1280x1024x24bit screen to 640x480x4 (16 colors?) so I had to seek that out from the vendor.
I had to download Mozilla - IE is disrecommended by DHS and CERT you know.
At times, during the day, it would take 2 minutes to respond to a mouse click.
It wasn't until 4pm when cygwin finished installing that I got my ssh pipe to home email going.
IM? gaim installed in seconds. Just like on Mandrake 10 or Redhat 9 or Fedora Core 1. I haven't played with Suse yet.
As soon as I figure out what I need to connect to & how to do it in linux, that laptop is getting formatted. I could've installed a nicely working Linux on it in an hour.
IIRC, you can't share calendars with the Sun system unless you run it on a central server.
Outlook/Exchange isn't about email. If you use 'em just for email, you spent way too much.
Exchange is for shared Calendaring and sharing documents and syncing with your PDA (whatever it might be). It'll replace your mail server also.
Install the User Agent extention.
And *LIE* to the websites that say they only work w/ IE on XP. Tell them you're running IE on XP, not Mozilla on Linux. Most of them will work anyways.
/. of course
NY Times email updates
NY Times Circuits (email too)
Freshmeat
Google News
Newsweek - because they start asking me to renew 10 months before my yearly sub is up!
Motocycle magazines for people that ride instead of pose:
Rider, Motorcycle Consumer News (*no* ads), Dirt Bike, Bike (import from England)
Linux Journal (sub since issue 4), sysadmin (sometimes). One of the other linux mags if there's a topic I find interesting
Analog (once a year or so)
Popular Photography.
Gee, I though I had more....
Maxim? In college I would've bought it if I wasn't man enough to buy real porn....
Cuecat!
You can get one on ebay cheap. There are lots of free programs to drive them.
I used one to read book UPC codes to input to Amazon.
Well, the X protocol compression at least.
It seems to be X protocol compression and conversion of RDP (terminal server) and mumble to X protocol for speedier access.
if as many man-hours were spent improving Minix as were spent improving Linux, who is to say which would be the best today.
Minix got quite a bit of man hours in the early days. comp.os.minix was the busiest newsgroup going until linux got fairly established.
What really held minix back:
1) The license. You had to buy it, then you could apply patches to modify the code. You could not distribute modified code. Just patches.
2) Lack of central authority for development. AST wasn't interested in developing Minix beyond a teaching tool. Kudos for him to stand his ground against all the pressure. The license kinda prevented anyone else from taking up the role either.
3) 8086 and 80286 limiting code to 64k code + 64k data. Minix-386 didn't have this limit. But 386s were expensive. Also, because of the license, Minix-386 was a series of patches...
4) Tools! With the data limit and a kernel that's very different from most Unixen, most tools couldn't be ported. Not vi, but elvis worked. No ksh/csh, just a bourne shell clone. Not awk, but a similar one. No GNU tools. Kermit worked on the 808x but was too big to compile. It needed to be cross compiled on the 386.
5) Linus, frustrated with the above limitations and wanting a real unix to run GNU stuff on and wanting to play w/ 386 code started Linux and released his work.
6) Linux fixed the problems Minix had for adoption. The license, central development, large memory access. That made it possible for others to easily share thier work and support GNU.
7) Linux aimed at making it easy to port GNU & other stuff to Linux. He wanted to develop the kernel, not the shell, editor, compiler, etc.
Mst of us using Minux just wanted to use the Unix environment. Minix was $100 vs $1000 for commercial Unix (SCO, Interactive, ummmm).
Minix had many of the same limits as DOS. Heck, I had GNU tools in DOS and editors that handled >64k files. Minix didn't. Linux did.
It also worked on my computer which 386BSD didn't. That also had a lack of central development until FreeBSD started. If Linux had come along a few years later, most people would probably be running FreeBSD instead.
True. (Dirty)DOS of course being originally based on CPM which in turn was based on Unix!
CP/M was more likely derived from a DEC OS. RSX? RSTS? Or something else like that?
It certainly wasn't Unix.
Look at MotoGP motorcycle racing. Less then 500lbs with 220HP. They're also narrow enoug that passing is common. Not just once a lap, but sometimes in successive corners.
Bikes also have that kind of deceleration & acceleration.
Try watching MotoGP motorcycle racing.
It *is* possible to overtake. Riders are pushing the limits of themselves, the suspension, the engine, and the tires. Oh - no pit stops either.
And one of the greatest riders ever, Rossi, switched from one of the best bikes ever (Honda) to Yamaha so now you're seeing him race at his limit too.
I find most car racing kinda boring after seeing the lead change 3 times in as many corners during MotoGP
Obviously you don't understand what syncing is about.
I keep all my addresses and schedule in my pilot. I carry it with me to the Dr, etc.
I keep all the data in my computer which is too big to carry with me. I can even sync to my wife's computer so she can see my schedule & addresses.
I sync the phone list to my phone so I don't have to use the keypad to enter them yet again. If a phone can't sync, I won't buy it. With syncing, I can also push those phone numbers back up to the computer & PDA.
It also provides a backup.
I don't like the GUI.
I grew up w/ DOS and learned C, AWK, Gnuplot, vi and emacs on DOS. I used MacOS 7 and Windows 3.1 I played with Minix but kept hitting its limits. I tried OS/2 and did the same thing. Finally I installed Linux after 386BSD failed to install.
Linux did everything I wanted w/o the memory limits. I could run GNU emacs instead of microemacs. I had a nice programmable shell.
And I could make the GUI do what I wanted when I needed a GUI. Some things are better in a GUI but it's hard to script.
I've used Win 98, NT 4, XP and MacOS X. I don't like the GUI. If you need to track dozens of systems (I'll have ~ 80 windows open), the single user model doesn't work.
I can change the GUI to suit my needs and use an integrated workspace manager. None of the others does that.
Oh yeah, having networkable graphics is nice too. I can run a CPU intensive thing on the fast server & display the GUI back to my desktop.
If you really want a firewall, don't put anything on it besides a firewall.
A 486 makes a nice firewall for a home user. Just about any cast off PC will do. That P3 500MHz is more then enough for a business's T1 with complicated FW rules and VPNs.
There was a DOS program that would turn 5 1.2MB floppies into a 5MB hard drive. You had to do the floppy shuffle, but it got you more storage.
Yes, this was on a 286. Back when a 40MB drive was $500.....
Palm Pilot.
My Handspring Visor has:
8MB ram 8MB flash ram backup
68000 CPU at 25MHz (?)
160x320(?) screen w/ 4 greyscale
My Sony Clie SJ22 has
16MB ram 128MB memory stick
faster 68000 at 33MHz
higher res screen in color
Compare to a Macintosh SE:
68000 cpu at 8MHz
4MB ram
1.4MB floppy
Maybe a 20MB hard drive
512x348(?) screen in black & white
The PDAs are do lots more then the SE. I can get Word & Excel compatibles for the Palm too.
Leased hardware worked for IBM until they got underpriced by minis & later, PCs.
It worked for Xerox until they got underpriced by copier manufactures.
Car leasing has serious competition in people buy the cars new & used.
If you can get lock-in from your customers as Xerox & IBM did, you'll do well. I think the cat is out of the bag for computers though.
If you ask me, the only answer to the music problem is a decentralized means of producing music, like ardour or, for the not-so-hungry college student, protools, and a centralized means of conveyance like CD Baby or audiolunchbox. Artists know how they want their music to sound. Record company hired slag producers do not.
I listen to Folk music. (http://www.wumb.org for a live stream). During the 60's Folk was popular w/ Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Janis Ian and a host of others. Enough that record companies picked up many Folk artists.
In the 80's, the big companies dropped Folk for the most part. It's all small potatoes nowadays as the fad has passed. But the artists went to smaller labels. Some started to self produce. In the end, most of the folk scene barely missed the big label's influences.
CD-R has done alot for the singer songwriters. Probably more then cassette tapes did for the previous generation. It's easy to make an album & put it on CDs to sell at concerts w/o any label being involved. And you can make a living at it.