When I make a backup, I like to be sure that I can actually use my backup to restore the current situation in case of a disaster. And a disc crash is such a disaster and will eventually happen. So it doesn't make sense to back up some saved games here and some documents there. If you do that, you'll have to spend quite a lot of time installing your OS on a fresh system and restoring the backup after that.
The backup I make (and I did mention both full and incremental), simply writes everything on my entire filesystem to tape. So if a crash occurs, all I have to do is boot from a specially prepared floppy, insert the correct tape and after a while I have the exact configuration back without a hassle.
Even then, newer Plextor drives have BURN-PROOF technology, which steps down burn speed when the PC starts falling behind.
Ok, I agree. But if you want to use such a (new) drive and CD-RW, you're absolutely going to spend more than I did.
Even then, what else (other than cracking RC5) are you going to be doing with your workstation while you're asleep?
My machines hardly ever do work when I'm asleep, but there are enough people out there who have their machines work flat out all night. I always wondered what strange things Oracle was doing on my HP9000 machines at night. It was something with indexes, I was told by the DBA, but I sure know it was a lot of work. And compiling huge programs is something that goes better at night. May be a bad example, but when I was playing with kernel-compiles on an ancient 486, I preferred to start the compile before I went to bed.
Well, a CDR could be a solution, but if you're going to buy something anyway, I'd still advise to go for a tapedrive. And I think most professional environments support me in this, because I've never seen a professional machine being backed up on a CD. Sure, a one-time backup of a Windoze box with Norton Ghost, but not a daily backup, meant to be a complete and up-to-date backup.
My system is always on and my cat likes to walk all over the keyboard.
I wonder if your cat saw lots of ads for cat food when taking a walk over the keyboard:) And I wonder what Predictive makes of a cat chasing the mouse...
At home I have a second hand Exabyte drive, 8mm. It may not be too fast and it can't write more than 5GB on a tape, but it works. I tried several methods (cpio, tar and dump) and dump proved to be the most convenient way to do it. At least for my needs.
A tape costs about $12 here. They're not too easy to find, most kiddies in smaller computer shops don't even know the name Exabyte, leave alone 8mm.
- I need an Exatape, 8mm, 112m please.
- Huh? Never seen those before, I have these...
- That's DDS, that's 4mm, that won't fit.
- Hmm, then what do 8mm tapes look like?
- Well, bigger for example... Never mind.
(Yup, this is a real-world conversation I've had twice already...)
But a colleague of mine found a bunch of those tapes that weren't being used anymore (most of them still shrink-wrapped) so now I make backups on this thing. Nice and smooth, I start dump just before I go to bed, next morning before I go to work I change the tapes and when I come home in the afternoon, everything's safe and sound on tape.
An incremental backup is a little trickier, at least in the way I do it. I'm Dutch, so I hate wasting tapes *grin*. So I simple made an index on the cassette and when an incremental backup is done, I record the position on the index. Next backup is simply started from that position. So I have 2 tapes for the full backup and 1 for several incremental ones.
Restoring is quite easy, dump's counterpart, restore, has the option -i, which makes it interactive. It's like having a shell and walking through your file system. Simply mark the files you want restored and presto...
The Exabyte works for me, but if I ever find a not-too-expensive DDS3-drive, I'll surely buy it. After all, DDS3 stores a lot more data on a tape that's easier to buy.
I don't think a CDR is a good solution for backups, although most sales guys in computer stores advise me to buy on from them...because it's the best way to do backups. A minor problem with CDs is that 600MB is not too much when making backups. But the real disadvantage is the chance of a failed write. If you burn, you'd better do nothing else with the machine. And if something fails, you'll have to start over again, on a new disc of course.
If I were you, I'd go for a 2nd hand tapedrive. Be sure to check if you can get tapes for it, BTW. DDS2 or 3 should be close to ideal.
Some months ago I bought myself some weights (5 kgs each).
Hmm, I didn't buy those, they simply appeared on my because of this work:)
But seriously, exercise is one of the most important and healthy cures. When I went to a doctor with those complaints, he sent me to a fysio therapeut (well, that's the Dutch word at least *grin*) before I could say hurt. This guy started a massage, which I expected to be pleasant. Wrong, it was very painful. But it worked. After a few sessions, the pain disappeared. He also gave me some hints for exercises which I would have to do 3 times a day, only a few minutes. Yup, after a few weeks the pain was gone!
But people are stupid and so was I. The pain disappeared and so did the need for the exercise, I thought. And so the pain returned. So I figured it would be wise to get some sort of structural exercise and to adjust my desk and chair. I now sit straight behind my screen, hands relaxed on the keyboard, wrists straight and both feet flat on the floor. Works great. And the exercise is done by leaving the car at home and cycling to work.
I know, the latter is not an option for a lot of people, but the first sure is. Get yourself a decent desk and chair. If you can type blindly, ask your employer for an ergonomic keyboard so that your wrists can really relax. Sure, those things can cost some money, but employers here are happy to do it for you. Why? Easy: it's a lot cheaper than have employees stay home because of all sorts of pain.
You've made your point if you're trying to say you don't like diesel. But I see a lot of claims without any glimps of evidence. What are your sources? Or do you just conclude things without having done any research? You should read some car magazines every now and then, maybe then you can shout things and have at least some idea of what you're talking about. For now, you seem to have about the same knowledge of car engines as the Dutch minister of Traffic. And that's not a compliment.
With just a little more effort, we can move to a cleaner, and (in the long run) cheaper fuels.
Now that makes sense. It should be a primary goal for car producers to find clean alternatives for our current fuels. I like the idea of hydrogen a lot, but fuel cells are great too. The theory is there already, let's hope these ideas come to live very soon now. Until then, we'll just have to make the best of it, and a modern, tuned and well-maintained diesel engine sure is a good way to minimize pollution.
Good point, very good point indeed. Problem is that it requires public transport to be (almost) as efficient as a car of your own. And with efficient, I mean efficient according to the one that needs transport. Unfortunately, that's hardly ever the reality.
And the efficient according to the bus and/or train company usually means running on diesel. Why? Because diesel has a better mpg-ratio than petrol.
Here in Oz virtually every petrol station has a LPG bowser. As all taxis & a good percentage of fleet cars are LPG or dual fuel (LPG/petrol) in Oz LPG is less than half the price of petrol & is cleaner too.
Here in the Netherlands almost every station sells LPG too, but I'm afraid in the larger part of the world, it's not really popular yet. The only marque I know to sell cars with an LPG-installation is Volvo, they sell most of their cars in a Bi-Fuel-version.
Problem with LPG, apart from the availability, is the reach of a tank: 300km on one tank is about as far as you get (although Volvo claims their cars run as far on LPG as on normal fuel), while my Peugeot 306 diesel runs over 800km on a tank. Of course I'm talking about European cars, I don't know how things are Down Under.
Different problem is the place of the LPG-tank. Until recently, the only way to have your car breathe LPG was to insert a huge gas tank in your trunk. Now that's a very serious reason not to choose LPG. Nowadays, most cars can be equipped with a nicely hidden tank: usually in the place of the spare wheel. Which gives another problem: you can't drive without a spare wheel (at least, not here), so you need to store that one somewhere else. Sure, you can get such a small one with which you can't drive over 80km/h, but still...
So sure, LPG is a nice alternative, but I think it's a little far-fetched to state that it's the way to go. I'd rather have a fuel-cell in my car, or an engine that runs on hydrogen and produces nothing but water. But I'm afraid it's going to take some time before we see that kind of engines appear in normal cars.
I drove a 1980 Ford f250 diesel truck for a while.
That doesn't really make sense, comparing a 20-years-old diesel car to a modern day petrol car. I never drove an American diesel, but concluding from what I read here, American diesels aren't nearly as good as their European colleagues. I was used to a petrol drinking car (Citroën BX, production ceased years ago, unfortunately) when I got my first company car, an Opel Corsa. Of course, equipped with a diesel engine. I admit, it was a little noisy, especially when cold, but it ran smoothly. I particularly liked the character of it: it's not as jumpy as a petrol engine. I'm sure my neighbours didn't like the car when I started it in the morning, after a freezing cold night, because of the thick blue-grey clouds that it threw into the air during the first 10-20 seconds. But as soon as the engine had the right temperature, no more smoke.
So far the old diesel. Now for the new ones. Of course you've heard of common rail technology, almost every marque has one these days, at least in Europe. Ford still doesn't have one in the new Mondeo, but that'll change soon, because the Focus already has one. Volkswagen's turbodiesels have been mentioned a few times already, and for good reasons. The Skoda Octavia uses a 1.9 VW turbodiesel, running an average of 20km per liter (ok, who does the conversions to imperial measures here *grin*) and even 25km/liter at 120km/h. And we're talking a 81kW/110hp engine here. And that's powerful enough for a 1250kg car, I don't need a dragster to go to work.
Famous are the HDi-engines of Peugeot. And, as said before, the more expensive cars of Peugeot (and therefore Citroën, which belongs to Peugeot, see the PSA site) come with a particle-filter, which makes reduces pollution to an extent never seen in diesel engines before. Believe me, I drove a Peugeot 406 diesel and it took a while before I realised it actually was a diesel. It was smooth, powerful and very silent (when I was waiting for a traffic light, I just had to check the rpm-meter to see if it was still running). And with the soot-filter, it's clean, simply check the data sheets of the engine and compare it to diesels without such a filter. And you can start right away, no need to wait for glowing spirals to become hot first. Even more silent was the Renault Laguna with 1.9 common rail diesel I drove some time ago. It's got 6 gears instead of 5 and when doing 120km/h in 6, the engine runs about 2000rpm. Now that's quiet and economic. Seems impossible to me to do that with a petrol engine, since those things don't perform that well at those speeds.
And now the reason why I think diesel engines do so well here in Europe. Statistics show that more and more cars are being leased. And what's interesting then is the cost per km. And in that regard, diesels have two important advantages: they run longer than petrol engines and they cost a lot (yes, a lot) less in fuel: consumption is less and the price of diesel is a lot lower (2.80 Dutch guilders for a liter RON95 petrol and only 1.70 for a liter diesel). Although I have to mention the efforts of our fine government to change that. For the sake of environment, they say, but more for the Treasury's sake I believe. After all, 2.80 (1.08 US dollars) for a liter of petrol isn't a normal price either. So maybe, if those bandits that call themselves ministers get their way, diesel engines may become less and less attractive. But until then, I'm happy to drive a diesel.
Let's start by saying that I was a sysadmin for about a year, when I made a move to consultancy, only last month. So I can't speak of experience (no burn-out, no pager, no years of experience), but that might be interesting (call it an undistorted view *grin*).
What I think anyone should do when fed up with something: move on. The main principle here is, IMHO, to do just those things you like and leave other things to others. If system administration is what you really like, you should stick to that (but try to convince your boss that having a social life is as important to you as it is to him and that the pager isn't exactly helping).
But I'm sure there are parts in administration that you like more than others. Here comes my point... I like the admin job, but I particularly like security-issues. So I try to concentrate on that. Did that in my former job and guess what: I get to do a security trajectory in my current job! Apart from the fact that I nearly doubled my income, this is what I like.
Furthermore I want to do some programming and DBA. Did a little of that in my own time and I liked it, so I decided I want to see if it would be nice to do as a job. So what I do is try to steer my employer into letting me do programming and DBA.
Main point: do what you like to do. And don't be afraid having to admit your interests have shifted after a few years. Simply go for the jobs you like best at that time. Carpe diem, as the Romans said.
I wonder, wouldn't it be very well possible for universities to start the change? It wouldn't be the first good thing they'd do, look at BSD and Sun.
For a uni it could well be worth the effort to migrate, after all, managing your network should become easier. Furthermore it would be a nice opportunity to teach students something about networks. Sure, it could be costly if routers have to be replaced because they don't support IPv6 yet (I don't know about that), but there will be some government fundings, no doubt. And if more and more IPv6-clouds appear, the threshold for others to migrate will become smaller and smaller.
I personally would welcome IPv6 with open arms. Not a chance here to get a decent connection to the Internet without some form of NAT, which means you can't run most services you'd like to.
Are there any plans for Civilization III to be made for the Mac, Linux or other gaming platforms?
The publisher, Hasbro Interactive, makes decisions regarding ports to other platforms. Since this is a major release, you'll most likely see ports to other platforms, but there are no commitments yet. We'll keep you posted.
I'd say let's start an action to convince them that they absolutely must make a Linux version of it.
... For those of you that want a fully
featured computer designed for professionals, that will also fit in your pocket, check out Psion.
If you want a fully featured computer, you simply go to your local discount store, buy the hardware you need and spend an afternoon building a decent machine.
If a fully featured toy is what you want, you buy such a great thing with which you can play 3 MP3 songs. I'd rather buy myself a Rio then, but ok, if that's what you want. Maybe a laptop would be a nice solution for you, ever thought of that?
If, however, you want a decent piece of hardware on which you can keep things like an agenda, a spreadsheet, a simple database and other stuff you need dozens of times a day, go for a Palm (or any efficient handheld for that matter). No, you don't get those nifty things like video, audio and other stuff, but hey, who needs it in a handheld? Some months ago there was a discussion here on/. about speech-recognition on a handheld. Same goes for that: who needs it on a handheld? If you want those things, get a laptop. The keyboard, mouse and screen are much better on a laptop than on whatever handheld.
I used to work for an international company and I was told that I could easily be transferred to another part of the world within the same company. So why not find such an employer (IBM, HP, Getronics (formerly known as Wang in the US), CapGemini, CMG) and tell that you would like to work all over the world. I'm sure that they're eager to put you on a job in a country where they can't find enough people, which seems to be the case in Ireland (great country BTW, no, I'm not Irish *grin*).
At least, that's what HP says on the info-page about OpenMail. Considering the efforts HP has put in Linux (see this page), I would think it is to be expected that OpenMail will be returned to the open source community. After all, why not? Dropping the product means, in the end, stop selling and supporting it and thus stop making money with it. So it would be a logical step to open the source (or should that be, reopen the source...? *grin*) and let your cherished open source community benefit from it. In that way, the product is still of use and the name of HP would circulate a bit more in the world of Linux and open source. Both commercially and politically correct, I'd say.
Furthermore, I think it would be interesting to know what kind of open source OpenMail was based on. Suppose it was GPL-ed code, that would mean HP could be forced to open things up. But I don't think that will be the case, I can't imagine a company like HP violating GPL like that. Still it would be interesting to know where the fundaments of OpenMail came from.
It's been mentioned before: the old UNIX tools don't use a GUI. Of course they don't, GUIs didn't exist when UNIX was developped. And because -contrary to Windows- not all programs are rewritten from scratch for every OS-patch, we basically use the same tools as back in the seventies.
If UNIX is ever to ship with a GUI as good as the one in Windows, the challenge is not to construct a new GUI (why invent the wheel time after time), but to change every program in the system so that it can deal with a GUI. I'm not too experienced in programming, but I can imagine something like redefining stdin, stdout and stderr so that the program will communicate with the GUI, instead of with the user.
So, the question is, who's going to do that? I don't expect the big companies like IBM and HP to start that change. Simply because their systems aren't used by desktop users, but by UNIX professionals. And the majority of them prefer a character-based shell. Companies that provide UNIX systems for use on the desktop are the ones I expect to initiate the revolution. Guys like Redhat, SuSE, Caldera, VALinux. They're the ones that would benefit a lot from a system that can be deployed on the desktop. Nowadays companies use UNIX-based servers because of obvious advantages, but Windows-based desktops because UNIX is too difficult for most "ordinary" users. If this would change so that -for example- Linux would be as user-friendly as Windows, I can imagine that a lot of organisations would give VALinux (just to mention one) a call to provide them with a complete IT-infrastructure based on one single system. Cheap and efficient. Stable servers, cheap desktops, specialists for just one platform and great compatibility.
What you can charge for a job depends on a lot of things. First off, you're probably not going to get a lot more than native people, so you should check the average level of salary for a given function in a given country before you leave. I don't know about other countries but in this little country there's a site to reliably check what you could ask for: Intermediair. I don't think it will be of any use for most of you, as it is in Dutch, but I included it anyway. Furthermore, it's interesting to see what the cost of living in a particular country are. You could whine about a salary of only $10/hour, but if your rent is only $50 a month, who cares? But maybe most important is whether or not you like working (and living) in that country. If my company would offer me a job in Germany, for example, they sure would have to raise my salary bigtime, but I would do fine with my current salary in France (Entschuldigung, just my personal taste, no flamebait)...
Re:This already exists, it's called linuxconf
on
Voice-Op Linux PDA
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· Score: 1
It sure is great, that's what I said in my post. But I have to disagree on the "it's similar to SAM, SMIT". Linuxconf is used to -as the name says- configurate Linux. No more, no less. The advantage of SMIT and SAM is that they also do tests, enable/disable hardware, format disks, create filesystems, add/delete/change users etc. With those tools, most of the complicated system administration tasks can be done by positioning the cursor and pressing Enter.
As for Linuxconf, I know it (of course I do) and I use it too. Changing things like default runlevel or the services started at boot-time is a lot quicker with Linuxconf than having to change bootscripts, like in the old days with Slackware. Good thing that -for example- RedHat ships with it.
Just a matter of getting used to:) But how useful would speech-recognition be in a PDA? If I'm in a train, I'd prefer to work with it in silence, it's nobody's business what I write in my agenda. Speech-recognition would make it more expensive and more power-consuming. I'd *love* to have speech-recognition on my PII at home, for writing letters or whatever, but not a PDA.
Porting SAM would be a nice idea. But I wasn't thinking of the C64-version, I'd prefer the HP-UX variant. Linuxconf, YaST etc sure are nice tools, but a tool like SAM (or SMIT in AIX) would make running Linux at home a lot easier for people with little or no experience in UNIX. Anyway, this is off-topic...
Slashdot Mirror
When I make a backup, I like to be sure that I can actually use my backup to restore the current situation in case of a disaster. And a disc crash is such a disaster and will eventually happen. So it doesn't make sense to back up some saved games here and some documents there. If you do that, you'll have to spend quite a lot of time installing your OS on a fresh system and restoring the backup after that.
The backup I make (and I did mention both full and incremental), simply writes everything on my entire filesystem to tape. So if a crash occurs, all I have to do is boot from a specially prepared floppy, insert the correct tape and after a while I have the exact configuration back without a hassle.
Even then, newer Plextor drives have BURN-PROOF technology, which steps down burn speed when the PC starts falling behind.
Ok, I agree. But if you want to use such a (new) drive and CD-RW, you're absolutely going to spend more than I did.
Even then, what else (other than cracking RC5) are you going to be doing with your workstation while you're asleep?
My machines hardly ever do work when I'm asleep, but there are enough people out there who have their machines work flat out all night. I always wondered what strange things Oracle was doing on my HP9000 machines at night. It was something with indexes, I was told by the DBA, but I sure know it was a lot of work. And compiling huge programs is something that goes better at night. May be a bad example, but when I was playing with kernel-compiles on an ancient 486, I preferred to start the compile before I went to bed.
Well, a CDR could be a solution, but if you're going to buy something anyway, I'd still advise to go for a tapedrive. And I think most professional environments support me in this, because I've never seen a professional machine being backed up on a CD. Sure, a one-time backup of a Windoze box with Norton Ghost, but not a daily backup, meant to be a complete and up-to-date backup.
SARCASM
/SARCASM
Ok, let's buy a few of them to play Quake on! After all, if it uses Linux, how expensive can it be?
I wonder if your cat saw lots of ads for cat food when taking a walk over the keyboard :) And I wonder what Predictive makes of a cat chasing the mouse...
A tape costs about $12 here. They're not too easy to find, most kiddies in smaller computer shops don't even know the name Exabyte, leave alone 8mm.
- I need an Exatape, 8mm, 112m please.
- Huh? Never seen those before, I have these...
- That's DDS, that's 4mm, that won't fit.
- Hmm, then what do 8mm tapes look like?
- Well, bigger for example... Never mind.
(Yup, this is a real-world conversation I've had twice already...)
But a colleague of mine found a bunch of those tapes that weren't being used anymore (most of them still shrink-wrapped) so now I make backups on this thing. Nice and smooth, I start dump just before I go to bed, next morning before I go to work I change the tapes and when I come home in the afternoon, everything's safe and sound on tape.
An incremental backup is a little trickier, at least in the way I do it. I'm Dutch, so I hate wasting tapes *grin*. So I simple made an index on the cassette and when an incremental backup is done, I record the position on the index. Next backup is simply started from that position. So I have 2 tapes for the full backup and 1 for several incremental ones.
Restoring is quite easy, dump's counterpart, restore, has the option -i, which makes it interactive. It's like having a shell and walking through your file system. Simply mark the files you want restored and presto...
The Exabyte works for me, but if I ever find a not-too-expensive DDS3-drive, I'll surely buy it. After all, DDS3 stores a lot more data on a tape that's easier to buy.
I don't think a CDR is a good solution for backups, although most sales guys in computer stores advise me to buy on from them ...because it's the best way to do backups. A minor problem with CDs is that 600MB is not too much when making backups. But the real disadvantage is the chance of a failed write. If you burn, you'd better do nothing else with the machine. And if something fails, you'll have to start over again, on a new disc of course.
If I were you, I'd go for a 2nd hand tapedrive. Be sure to check if you can get tapes for it, BTW. DDS2 or 3 should be close to ideal.
Hmm, I didn't buy those, they simply appeared on my because of this work :)
But seriously, exercise is one of the most important and healthy cures. When I went to a doctor with those complaints, he sent me to a fysio therapeut (well, that's the Dutch word at least *grin*) before I could say hurt. This guy started a massage, which I expected to be pleasant. Wrong, it was very painful. But it worked. After a few sessions, the pain disappeared. He also gave me some hints for exercises which I would have to do 3 times a day, only a few minutes. Yup, after a few weeks the pain was gone!
But people are stupid and so was I. The pain disappeared and so did the need for the exercise, I thought. And so the pain returned. So I figured it would be wise to get some sort of structural exercise and to adjust my desk and chair. I now sit straight behind my screen, hands relaxed on the keyboard, wrists straight and both feet flat on the floor. Works great. And the exercise is done by leaving the car at home and cycling to work.
I know, the latter is not an option for a lot of people, but the first sure is. Get yourself a decent desk and chair. If you can type blindly, ask your employer for an ergonomic keyboard so that your wrists can really relax. Sure, those things can cost some money, but employers here are happy to do it for you. Why? Easy: it's a lot cheaper than have employees stay home because of all sorts of pain.
With just a little more effort, we can move to a cleaner, and (in the long run) cheaper fuels.
Now that makes sense. It should be a primary goal for car producers to find clean alternatives for our current fuels. I like the idea of hydrogen a lot, but fuel cells are great too. The theory is there already, let's hope these ideas come to live very soon now. Until then, we'll just have to make the best of it, and a modern, tuned and well-maintained diesel engine sure is a good way to minimize pollution.
And the efficient according to the bus and/or train company usually means running on diesel. Why? Because diesel has a better mpg-ratio than petrol.
Here in the Netherlands almost every station sells LPG too, but I'm afraid in the larger part of the world, it's not really popular yet. The only marque I know to sell cars with an LPG-installation is Volvo, they sell most of their cars in a Bi-Fuel-version.
Problem with LPG, apart from the availability, is the reach of a tank: 300km on one tank is about as far as you get (although Volvo claims their cars run as far on LPG as on normal fuel), while my Peugeot 306 diesel runs over 800km on a tank. Of course I'm talking about European cars, I don't know how things are Down Under.
Different problem is the place of the LPG-tank. Until recently, the only way to have your car breathe LPG was to insert a huge gas tank in your trunk. Now that's a very serious reason not to choose LPG. Nowadays, most cars can be equipped with a nicely hidden tank: usually in the place of the spare wheel. Which gives another problem: you can't drive without a spare wheel (at least, not here), so you need to store that one somewhere else. Sure, you can get such a small one with which you can't drive over 80km/h, but still...
So sure, LPG is a nice alternative, but I think it's a little far-fetched to state that it's the way to go. I'd rather have a fuel-cell in my car, or an engine that runs on hydrogen and produces nothing but water. But I'm afraid it's going to take some time before we see that kind of engines appear in normal cars.
That doesn't really make sense, comparing a 20-years-old diesel car to a modern day petrol car. I never drove an American diesel, but concluding from what I read here, American diesels aren't nearly as good as their European colleagues. I was used to a petrol drinking car (Citroën BX, production ceased years ago, unfortunately) when I got my first company car, an Opel Corsa. Of course, equipped with a diesel engine. I admit, it was a little noisy, especially when cold, but it ran smoothly. I particularly liked the character of it: it's not as jumpy as a petrol engine. I'm sure my neighbours didn't like the car when I started it in the morning, after a freezing cold night, because of the thick blue-grey clouds that it threw into the air during the first 10-20 seconds. But as soon as the engine had the right temperature, no more smoke.
So far the old diesel. Now for the new ones. Of course you've heard of common rail technology, almost every marque has one these days, at least in Europe. Ford still doesn't have one in the new Mondeo, but that'll change soon, because the Focus already has one. Volkswagen's turbodiesels have been mentioned a few times already, and for good reasons. The Skoda Octavia uses a 1.9 VW turbodiesel, running an average of 20km per liter (ok, who does the conversions to imperial measures here *grin*) and even 25km/liter at 120km/h. And we're talking a 81kW/110hp engine here. And that's powerful enough for a 1250kg car, I don't need a dragster to go to work.
Famous are the HDi-engines of Peugeot. And, as said before, the more expensive cars of Peugeot (and therefore Citroën, which belongs to Peugeot, see the PSA site) come with a particle-filter, which makes reduces pollution to an extent never seen in diesel engines before. Believe me, I drove a Peugeot 406 diesel and it took a while before I realised it actually was a diesel. It was smooth, powerful and very silent (when I was waiting for a traffic light, I just had to check the rpm-meter to see if it was still running). And with the soot-filter, it's clean, simply check the data sheets of the engine and compare it to diesels without such a filter. And you can start right away, no need to wait for glowing spirals to become hot first. Even more silent was the Renault Laguna with 1.9 common rail diesel I drove some time ago. It's got 6 gears instead of 5 and when doing 120km/h in 6, the engine runs about 2000rpm. Now that's quiet and economic. Seems impossible to me to do that with a petrol engine, since those things don't perform that well at those speeds.
And now the reason why I think diesel engines do so well here in Europe. Statistics show that more and more cars are being leased. And what's interesting then is the cost per km. And in that regard, diesels have two important advantages: they run longer than petrol engines and they cost a lot (yes, a lot) less in fuel: consumption is less and the price of diesel is a lot lower (2.80 Dutch guilders for a liter RON95 petrol and only 1.70 for a liter diesel). Although I have to mention the efforts of our fine government to change that. For the sake of environment, they say, but more for the Treasury's sake I believe. After all, 2.80 (1.08 US dollars) for a liter of petrol isn't a normal price either. So maybe, if those bandits that call themselves ministers get their way, diesel engines may become less and less attractive. But until then, I'm happy to drive a diesel.
What I think anyone should do when fed up with something: move on. The main principle here is, IMHO, to do just those things you like and leave other things to others. If system administration is what you really like, you should stick to that (but try to convince your boss that having a social life is as important to you as it is to him and that the pager isn't exactly helping).
But I'm sure there are parts in administration that you like more than others. Here comes my point... I like the admin job, but I particularly like security-issues. So I try to concentrate on that. Did that in my former job and guess what: I get to do a security trajectory in my current job! Apart from the fact that I nearly doubled my income, this is what I like.
Furthermore I want to do some programming and DBA. Did a little of that in my own time and I liked it, so I decided I want to see if it would be nice to do as a job. So what I do is try to steer my employer into letting me do programming and DBA.
Main point: do what you like to do. And don't be afraid having to admit your interests have shifted after a few years. Simply go for the jobs you like best at that time. Carpe diem, as the Romans said.
For a uni it could well be worth the effort to migrate, after all, managing your network should become easier. Furthermore it would be a nice opportunity to teach students something about networks. Sure, it could be costly if routers have to be replaced because they don't support IPv6 yet (I don't know about that), but there will be some government fundings, no doubt. And if more and more IPv6-clouds appear, the threshold for others to migrate will become smaller and smaller.
I personally would welcome IPv6 with open arms. Not a chance here to get a decent connection to the Internet without some form of NAT, which means you can't run most services you'd like to.
Are there any plans for Civilization III to be made for the Mac, Linux or other gaming platforms?
The publisher, Hasbro Interactive, makes decisions regarding ports to other platforms. Since this is a major release, you'll most likely see ports to other platforms, but there are no commitments yet. We'll keep you posted.
I'd say let's start an action to convince them that they absolutely must make a Linux version of it.
If you want a fully featured computer, you simply go to your local discount store, buy the hardware you need and spend an afternoon building a decent machine.
If a fully featured toy is what you want, you buy such a great thing with which you can play 3 MP3 songs. I'd rather buy myself a Rio then, but ok, if that's what you want. Maybe a laptop would be a nice solution for you, ever thought of that?
If, however, you want a decent piece of hardware on which you can keep things like an agenda, a spreadsheet, a simple database and other stuff you need dozens of times a day, go for a Palm (or any efficient handheld for that matter). No, you don't get those nifty things like video, audio and other stuff, but hey, who needs it in a handheld? Some months ago there was a discussion here on /. about speech-recognition on a handheld. Same goes for that: who needs it on a handheld? If you want those things, get a laptop. The keyboard, mouse and screen are much better on a laptop than on whatever handheld.
Good luck!
Furthermore, I think it would be interesting to know what kind of open source OpenMail was based on. Suppose it was GPL-ed code, that would mean HP could be forced to open things up. But I don't think that will be the case, I can't imagine a company like HP violating GPL like that. Still it would be interesting to know where the fundaments of OpenMail came from.
Who rated this "flamebait"? I'd rate it "funny".
If UNIX is ever to ship with a GUI as good as the one in Windows, the challenge is not to construct a new GUI (why invent the wheel time after time), but to change every program in the system so that it can deal with a GUI. I'm not too experienced in programming, but I can imagine something like redefining stdin, stdout and stderr so that the program will communicate with the GUI, instead of with the user.
So, the question is, who's going to do that? I don't expect the big companies like IBM and HP to start that change. Simply because their systems aren't used by desktop users, but by UNIX professionals. And the majority of them prefer a character-based shell. Companies that provide UNIX systems for use on the desktop are the ones I expect to initiate the revolution. Guys like Redhat, SuSE, Caldera, VALinux. They're the ones that would benefit a lot from a system that can be deployed on the desktop. Nowadays companies use UNIX-based servers because of obvious advantages, but Windows-based desktops because UNIX is too difficult for most "ordinary" users. If this would change so that -for example- Linux would be as user-friendly as Windows, I can imagine that a lot of organisations would give VALinux (just to mention one) a call to provide them with a complete IT-infrastructure based on one single system. Cheap and efficient. Stable servers, cheap desktops, specialists for just one platform and great compatibility.
What you can charge for a job depends on a lot of things. First off, you're probably not going to get a lot more than native people, so you should check the average level of salary for a given function in a given country before you leave. I don't know about other countries but in this little country there's a site to reliably check what you could ask for: Intermediair. I don't think it will be of any use for most of you, as it is in Dutch, but I included it anyway. Furthermore, it's interesting to see what the cost of living in a particular country are. You could whine about a salary of only $10/hour, but if your rent is only $50 a month, who cares? But maybe most important is whether or not you like working (and living) in that country. If my company would offer me a job in Germany, for example, they sure would have to raise my salary bigtime, but I would do fine with my current salary in France (Entschuldigung, just my personal taste, no flamebait)...
As for Linuxconf, I know it (of course I do) and I use it too. Changing things like default runlevel or the services started at boot-time is a lot quicker with Linuxconf than having to change bootscripts, like in the old days with Slackware. Good thing that -for example- RedHat ships with it.
How about putting the interview with Jon online right here on Slashdot? MPEG or so? Maybe DVD? :) Would sure solve my problem of not having a TV.
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