Even lonlier contracts are ones where I had to take data off VMS.
But it wasnt a contract, just personal fun, when I hooked two computers using a passive arcnet hub. Does anyone else here know the arcnet drivers in the linux kernel are broken? Has anyone else EVER tried setting up the arcnet network?
Put a few games on the computer. Let them see the game being played at least once.
Then let THEM learn the ins and outs of the computer, learn to install OSes and fixup games. Do NOT underestimate the power of games teaching kids how to fix the computer. Most people improve their typing by yakking on MSN messenger (and previously IRC). They dont open the typing tutorial book an hour each day. Similarly many slashdot readers started out trying to just fix the computer to play the damn games. No need to goto college to reinstall windows.
Once theyve seen the games, one kid will put enough effort to fix the machine up to play games. Other kids will see him and follow suit. Underprivileged frequently also means they have enough time on their hands (assuming theyre not WORKING too). Make the hardware and software available, give them the incentive and let THEM to the work. They'll thank you for it.
Think of it this way, its like giving a highschool kid a broken Mustang. He'll turn into a mechanic trying to fix it since he has an incentive to own a sportcar for free... as a side effect, you're producing a mechanic there.
Forget dual-booting. Think Xen. Thats when it gets interesting... When you can with keyboard shortcuts swap in running versions of Linux, Windows and OSX...
Godaddy oughtta really hire Monica Lewinsky or someone similar placed nicely in the whitehouse. (2) Obtain exclusive access to a major part of the net. (3) Profit!!!
I wanna know how Verisign is pulling off what its pulling off right now.
Wait till a full 32-qbit ALU becomes feasible. Quantum computers and optical interconnect will break the electric speed limit and will be quite revolutionary (upto 8-bit operations are already being done with 8 atoms). Its pretty much around-the-corner.
Else good fuel cells will be revolutionary. Think of a laptop that you can ACTUALLY carry out with you running and work from the park.
If thats not revolutionary enough for you, cars will be electric...(and much simpler and cheaper too) and wait till nuclear fusion becomes commonly available. Electricity prices will drop.
Flash is getting faster and more reliable. Think of an 80GB flash disk. Especially if its cheaper than the winchester equivalent. Drop that laptop all you want! I consider that revolutionary.
Still not convinced? Think of everyone using Linux as standard, think of free wireless Internet in all cities, laptops that can last a week, and chips that run as cool as TMS370 (that Ti chip that runs off fumes pretty much, around 5uA).
The space elevator will be built in 50 years and people will land on Mars.
But something even more revolutionary than these will probably come up suddenly. I still have faith in a cold-temp hydrogen fusion reaction and wormholes. When youll see a real live T-Rex walking around in a Jurassic Zoo, you'll say holy crap, we were wrong. Mammoth bodies with intact DNA have been found already. I'd be more interested in homonids from the Ice Age, Homo Erectus, Neanderthals and Florensis. Think of keeping THOSE around for a pet, or just to lug that desktop around for ya between lanparties.
This may be more because of incompetent netadmins than vile employees. Maybe more so because of lax security. Tighten up the computers, the type of traffic that can travel, the ports, the installed apps, passwords etc and an employee on a mission cant break in except into her own account. Security in a workplace lan is more than just put an MS Windows 2000 Server Firewall, its segregated security groupings per department and employee.
I'm Muslim, but I'm certainly not an Arab. For some reason Muslims are always associated with Arabs. Most Muslims are NOT Arabs.
My ancestor civilization was associated with the invention of guns and paper money, but since they were not Arab, those inventions will not be listed as Muslims.
OTOH Arab inventions since before the time of Mohammed are listed. To really know Muslims, you have to travel to Indonesia, Pakistan, Iran, Central Asia, Africa and Turkey as well as Arabia.
I liked War of the Worlds. No idea why it wasnt as popular as it shouldve been. Maybe I liked it because I read the book years ago.
Lord of War, Munich, Syriana. Are these bad movies? Its just that theyre not 'blockbuster' movies like Terminator 2 and Titanic, but theyre good. Maybe they should make Terminator 4, and not make it anything like Terminator 3.
Are you kidding me? Fedora was a bad joke on the opensource community which gave birth to, and continues to feed redhat.
Fedora is throwing the scraps to the dogs. The whole reason why anyone would choose redhat or suse is theyre enterprise and have been well standardized. You can much more easily run Oracle, DB2, Domino, Websphere etc on these two (as certified) than on slackware, debian, knoppix, gentoo, mandrake. Say you own a company and need an oracle server. You pick up a cheap server with good raid disks and install redhat and suse, then oracle. Even if youre a slackware or gentoo fan, you'll have to use redhat or suse to avoid the headaches.
Now how easy is it to install those enterprise commercial apps on fedora?
If nothing is shorting the pins, or changing the capacitance between two conductors too much, or damaging the electrolytes in electrolytic capacitors, I'd say electronics are pretty tough. Some parts might rust and tarnish on contact with water, but most boards are coated with material to resist that. I've gotten computer parts wet before, and they worked after being dried immediately. Metal + oxygen + water + time = rust. Otherwise theres no reason it shouldnt work.
I wonder if the right amount of coating on a circuit board can make it completely waterproof...
I am at a complete loss as to why didnt he just pull a wire from a neighbor? Why does it have to be all vertical... entirely in his own space? Its spacially way too inefficient.
I dont care what voltage type they use in the enterprise. We seriously need 5V DC in the house. I have way more electronics that need 12V,5V and 3.3V than ones that need 110V. So everything needs a walwart that dies every year.
Still doesnt change the fact that its not illegal.
You can come out of your house yell at me to get away from your house and call the police, even if I'm just using the sidewalk to get from A to B. Now nmapping isnt exactly polite, but it certainly cant be illegal. Put simply connecting to a port that might be closed is NOT illegal... else on http instead of a 404 error, I should get a 911-police dispatched to your house error.
The RATE of connections is a gray area. If I absolutely bombard google with small queries that take a huge amount of processing power, I can be charged with DDoS attacks. But theres a threshold, pressing F5 constantly on a sports news site is different... creating a program and setup designed to bring down a server is illegal or should be.
Now portmapping is not DDoS. Its not nearly fast enough to slow down a pentium 1 at 100MHz server. The packets themselves are tiny, thus dont jam bandwidth. Playing games, running VNC or VoIP uses more small packets than portmapping.
If theres a constant attempt to bring down my server, lots of bad ssh login attempts etc, I'll portscan the IP. Just to know who is it... is it a hijacked server, some unix machine or comes from some residential winxp machine. This is to be able to fix my problem. I'll also do a reverse DNS check to find the ISP and geographical location. None of that is illegal or should be.
I was disciplined too at 2 colleges for portmapping the servers. Heck that was when I was NOT trying to break in or anything. I DID try to break in in other educational institutions, and for the record I succeeded without ever getting caught (except once the girls found a sheet with everyones passwords in my desk). In the colleges, I portscanned the servers to figure out the network topology, to know how do I get out, what servers and services are available etc. And just curiosity in that huge LAN. Nothing negative against the institution.
If portscanning becomes illegal, maybe passing by someone's house too many times in a day will be illegal too. So I cant walk by your house more than 4 times in a day. If both my work and the doctors are on your street, I'll have to take a different path to get to the doctors.
"What do I need to bring to the table to be considered for even a menial position, these days?"
Jobsearching skills.
And I'm really not kidding. Jobhunting skills weigh more than fixing-a-computer-through-knoppix-remastering skills. They do NOT teach you that in college (thank God).
Thats not at all why we're not using Linux across the board at our company. We've used it as a server in the past, but never as a client. We use knoppix to debug hardware and the network but thats about it.
X's latency was an issue. This was brought up a few times on slashdot with the fanboys yelling and pretending there was no latency issue with X + decent windowmanager. Now both redhat and novell are releasing opengl-based X servers which will fix that issue. Next in the line is binary compatibility. We just have too many win32 apps out there that we NEED and cant confidently use with WINEX. No matter how 'certified' they are to be used with WINEX, I dont care. They were never designed and tested with WINEX, and we'll have hell trying to get support for a broken win32 app on WINEX. Not a position companies want to be in.
After that will come standardization. Redhat and suse are kind of the standard these days. When you have to build a commercial linux app, you make it for redhat AS and suse. The layout and configuration of these distros are fixed and predictable enough. What you need is to be able to put in a CD or double-click an icon, watch a meter go for a while, and the app show up in your windowmanager's application bar. Other apps should know its there and the dependency system should never ever ask for that app while its really been installed. Uninstalling or reconfiguring or patching or upgrading the app should be just as easy... click click click.
Fix these and the uptake of Linux will bring Microsoft down fast. App developers dont want to pay through their arses for Microsoft dev tools and their horrid interfaces, and want to use API and wrappers they can use to build for multiple OSes. They WANT to build apps for Linux. Consumers WANT to use linux. Its just these nagging issues that are in the way (and are currently being fixed). The biggest one is binary compatibility. I know there are 100,000 userIDs on slashdot who pretend this is not an issue, and that you can find equivalent OSS apps. You cant. You just cant find the equivalent of photoshop, lotus, autocad, dreamweaver and the plethora of ERP systems. Now THAT will take time and $$$ to fix. Nobody cares for the obscure Microsoft features that noone uses.
When you first look at a server, you see a PC. I did wonder that too, why are we paying $10,000+ for x86 IBM servers each?
Look at a nice big server, minus the CPU, RAM and disks. Its cheap. So the basic structure is not TOO much expensive over desktops.
Next open it up and take a look around. Its designed to keep running. I run Linux and solaris at home and most of my downtime is caused by either a hardware problem or hardware change. Servers have redundant everything, plenty of space to upgrade and designed to keep running.
Disks are a major issue. A SCSI disk costs way more than IDE.. I know since I run SCSI disks in my desktop. They are also bulletproof. I've lost more IDE disks than SCSI... and 8 SCSI disks lined up and running 24x7 is more of a peace of mind than 8 IDE disks constantly being hammered. Theyre also much faster.
Many motherboards have RAID of some sort. They cant compete with servraid and the likes found in servers. You dont have to reboot on every change and the bios that come with these disk controllers allow you to get out of trouble with no OS or boot disks around.
Servers keep things running. A company can lose $10,000 a day of downtime ( a small company mind you), so a single day of downtime will be more expensive for you if youre running a PC as a server. Sure PCs can perform well, especially given SCSI disks. But you can also find real cheap $500 servers out there with IDE disks which are hardly different from PCs. OTOH larger servers allow you to change a disk in a raid volume on the go without hardly a performance bump. You dont get 100ms of downtime. Thats worth real $$$ to some people.
And go higher, you can hotplug PCI, even CPUs and memory in mainframes. In fact with real logical partitions you can move a constantly running OS with apps in realtime to another server, without a burp. PCs can kick ass, give it an Athlon 64 FX60 or something, 500GB disk and you can say in raw resources it beats any server for the price. But companies still run AS/400s and VMS machines after 20 odd years in lieu of your FX-60, paying more $$$ simply because they keep running their businesses.
Slashdot Mirror
Even lonlier contracts are ones where I had to take data off VMS.
But it wasnt a contract, just personal fun, when I hooked two computers using a passive arcnet hub. Does anyone else here know the arcnet drivers in the linux kernel are broken? Has anyone else EVER tried setting up the arcnet network?
Saw pile of switches and I thought that. But there was no pile o unix workstations... so it cant be my desk.
Also looks way too organized.
Put a few games on the computer. Let them see the game being played at least once.
Then let THEM learn the ins and outs of the computer, learn to install OSes and fixup games. Do NOT underestimate the power of games teaching kids how to fix the computer. Most people improve their typing by yakking on MSN messenger (and previously IRC). They dont open the typing tutorial book an hour each day. Similarly many slashdot readers started out trying to just fix the computer to play the damn games. No need to goto college to reinstall windows.
Once theyve seen the games, one kid will put enough effort to fix the machine up to play games. Other kids will see him and follow suit. Underprivileged frequently also means they have enough time on their hands (assuming theyre not WORKING too). Make the hardware and software available, give them the incentive and let THEM to the work. They'll thank you for it.
Think of it this way, its like giving a highschool kid a broken Mustang. He'll turn into a mechanic trying to fix it since he has an incentive to own a sportcar for free... as a side effect, you're producing a mechanic there.
Forget dual-booting. Think Xen. Thats when it gets interesting...
When you can with keyboard shortcuts swap in running versions of Linux, Windows and OSX...
Godaddy oughtta really hire Monica Lewinsky or someone similar placed nicely in the whitehouse.
(2) Obtain exclusive access to a major part of the net.
(3) Profit!!!
I wanna know how Verisign is pulling off what its pulling off right now.
Wait till a full 32-qbit ALU becomes feasible. Quantum computers and optical interconnect will break the electric speed limit and will be quite revolutionary (upto 8-bit operations are already being done with 8 atoms). Its pretty much around-the-corner.
Else good fuel cells will be revolutionary. Think of a laptop that you can ACTUALLY carry out with you running and work from the park.
If thats not revolutionary enough for you, cars will be electric...(and much simpler and cheaper too) and wait till nuclear fusion becomes commonly available. Electricity prices will drop.
Flash is getting faster and more reliable. Think of an 80GB flash disk. Especially if its cheaper than the winchester equivalent. Drop that laptop all you want! I consider that revolutionary.
Still not convinced? Think of everyone using Linux as standard, think of free wireless Internet in all cities, laptops that can last a week, and chips that run as cool as TMS370 (that Ti chip that runs off fumes pretty much, around 5uA).
The space elevator will be built in 50 years and people will land on Mars.
But something even more revolutionary than these will probably come up suddenly. I still have faith in a cold-temp hydrogen fusion reaction and wormholes. When youll see a real live T-Rex walking around in a Jurassic Zoo, you'll say holy crap, we were wrong. Mammoth bodies with intact DNA have been found already. I'd be more interested in homonids from the Ice Age, Homo Erectus, Neanderthals and Florensis. Think of keeping THOSE around for a pet, or just to lug that desktop around for ya between lanparties.
"opportunities for workplace crime are growing"
This may be more because of incompetent netadmins than vile employees. Maybe more so because of lax security. Tighten up the computers, the type of traffic that can travel, the ports, the installed apps, passwords etc and an employee on a mission cant break in except into her own account. Security in a workplace lan is more than just put an MS Windows 2000 Server Firewall, its segregated security groupings per department and employee.
Security is good. Give it a shot.
How offensive.
--
A Mongol.
It was more like the Mongols since they destroyed the Khwarazm empire, Arabia, Persia and gained the full attention of the Crusaders.
But then they turned Muslim too and started promoting Islam as well. It wasnt exactly destroyed.
I agree.
I'm Muslim, but I'm certainly not an Arab. For some reason Muslims are always associated with Arabs. Most Muslims are NOT Arabs.
My ancestor civilization was associated with the invention of guns and paper money, but since they were not Arab, those inventions will not be listed as Muslims.
OTOH Arab inventions since before the time of Mohammed are listed. To really know Muslims, you have to travel to Indonesia, Pakistan, Iran, Central Asia, Africa and Turkey as well as Arabia.
Yeah thats all Ubuntu is, standard Linux, just polished out a little bit.
I liked War of the Worlds. No idea why it wasnt as popular as it shouldve been. Maybe I liked it because I read the book years ago.
Lord of War, Munich, Syriana. Are these bad movies? Its just that theyre not 'blockbuster' movies like Terminator 2 and Titanic, but theyre good. Maybe they should make Terminator 4, and not make it anything like Terminator 3.
Are you kidding me? Fedora was a bad joke on the opensource community which gave birth to, and continues to feed redhat.
Fedora is throwing the scraps to the dogs. The whole reason why anyone would choose redhat or suse is theyre enterprise and have been well standardized. You can much more easily run Oracle, DB2, Domino, Websphere etc on these two (as certified) than on slackware, debian, knoppix, gentoo, mandrake. Say you own a company and need an oracle server. You pick up a cheap server with good raid disks and install redhat and suse, then oracle. Even if youre a slackware or gentoo fan, you'll have to use redhat or suse to avoid the headaches.
Now how easy is it to install those enterprise commercial apps on fedora?
Just ask ftp.cdrom.com. One-stop shop for all Linux applications and games.
The article says a baby girl is shown as lisa driving marg's car. First its Marge, not Marg, and Lisa is the older sister.
I wouldnt bother with the corrections except this IS slashdot.
If nothing is shorting the pins, or changing the capacitance between two conductors too much, or damaging the electrolytes in electrolytic capacitors, I'd say electronics are pretty tough. Some parts might rust and tarnish on contact with water, but most boards are coated with material to resist that. I've gotten computer parts wet before, and they worked after being dried immediately. Metal + oxygen + water + time = rust. Otherwise theres no reason it shouldnt work.
I wonder if the right amount of coating on a circuit board can make it completely waterproof...
I am at a complete loss as to why didnt he just pull a wire from a neighbor? Why does it have to be all vertical... entirely in his own space? Its spacially way too inefficient.
I dont care what voltage type they use in the enterprise. We seriously need 5V DC in the house. I have way more electronics that need 12V,5V and 3.3V than ones that need 110V. So everything needs a walwart that dies every year.
Still doesnt change the fact that its not illegal.
You can come out of your house yell at me to get away from your house and call the police, even if I'm just using the sidewalk to get from A to B. Now nmapping isnt exactly polite, but it certainly cant be illegal. Put simply connecting to a port that might be closed is NOT illegal... else on http instead of a 404 error, I should get a 911-police dispatched to your house error.
The RATE of connections is a gray area. If I absolutely bombard google with small queries that take a huge amount of processing power, I can be charged with DDoS attacks. But theres a threshold, pressing F5 constantly on a sports news site is different... creating a program and setup designed to bring down a server is illegal or should be.
Now portmapping is not DDoS. Its not nearly fast enough to slow down a pentium 1 at 100MHz server. The packets themselves are tiny, thus dont jam bandwidth. Playing games, running VNC or VoIP uses more small packets than portmapping.
If theres a constant attempt to bring down my server, lots of bad ssh login attempts etc, I'll portscan the IP. Just to know who is it... is it a hijacked server, some unix machine or comes from some residential winxp machine. This is to be able to fix my problem. I'll also do a reverse DNS check to find the ISP and geographical location. None of that is illegal or should be.
I was disciplined too at 2 colleges for portmapping the servers. Heck that was when I was NOT trying to break in or anything. I DID try to break in in other educational institutions, and for the record I succeeded without ever getting caught (except once the girls found a sheet with everyones passwords in my desk). In the colleges, I portscanned the servers to figure out the network topology, to know how do I get out, what servers and services are available etc. And just curiosity in that huge LAN. Nothing negative against the institution.
If portscanning becomes illegal, maybe passing by someone's house too many times in a day will be illegal too. So I cant walk by your house more than 4 times in a day. If both my work and the doctors are on your street, I'll have to take a different path to get to the doctors.
Fucking hell.
"What do I need to bring to the table to be considered for even a menial position, these days?"
Jobsearching skills.
And I'm really not kidding. Jobhunting skills weigh more than fixing-a-computer-through-knoppix-remastering skills. They do NOT teach you that in college (thank God).
Where did you hear that?
Thats not at all why we're not using Linux across the board at our company. We've used it as a server in the past, but never as a client. We use knoppix to debug hardware and the network but thats about it.
X's latency was an issue. This was brought up a few times on slashdot with the fanboys yelling and pretending there was no latency issue with X + decent windowmanager. Now both redhat and novell are releasing opengl-based X servers which will fix that issue. Next in the line is binary compatibility. We just have too many win32 apps out there that we NEED and cant confidently use with WINEX. No matter how 'certified' they are to be used with WINEX, I dont care. They were never designed and tested with WINEX, and we'll have hell trying to get support for a broken win32 app on WINEX. Not a position companies want to be in.
After that will come standardization. Redhat and suse are kind of the standard these days. When you have to build a commercial linux app, you make it for redhat AS and suse. The layout and configuration of these distros are fixed and predictable enough. What you need is to be able to put in a CD or double-click an icon, watch a meter go for a while, and the app show up in your windowmanager's application bar. Other apps should know its there and the dependency system should never ever ask for that app while its really been installed. Uninstalling or reconfiguring or patching or upgrading the app should be just as easy... click click click.
Fix these and the uptake of Linux will bring Microsoft down fast. App developers dont want to pay through their arses for Microsoft dev tools and their horrid interfaces, and want to use API and wrappers they can use to build for multiple OSes. They WANT to build apps for Linux. Consumers WANT to use linux. Its just these nagging issues that are in the way (and are currently being fixed). The biggest one is binary compatibility. I know there are 100,000 userIDs on slashdot who pretend this is not an issue, and that you can find equivalent OSS apps. You cant. You just cant find the equivalent of photoshop, lotus, autocad, dreamweaver and the plethora of ERP systems. Now THAT will take time and $$$ to fix. Nobody cares for the obscure Microsoft features that noone uses.
Huh? I thought the cores were all 64-bit which means 64-bit ALU, which should mean 64-bit integers like other 64-bit cores. Am I missing something?
...A 10-year experience of Windows XP will help.
When you first look at a server, you see a PC. I did wonder that too, why are we paying $10,000+ for x86 IBM servers each?
Look at a nice big server, minus the CPU, RAM and disks. Its cheap. So the basic structure is not TOO much expensive over desktops.
Next open it up and take a look around. Its designed to keep running. I run Linux and solaris at home and most of my downtime is caused by either a hardware problem or hardware change. Servers have redundant everything, plenty of space to upgrade and designed to keep running.
Disks are a major issue. A SCSI disk costs way more than IDE.. I know since I run SCSI disks in my desktop. They are also bulletproof. I've lost more IDE disks than SCSI... and 8 SCSI disks lined up and running 24x7 is more of a peace of mind than 8 IDE disks constantly being hammered. Theyre also much faster.
Many motherboards have RAID of some sort. They cant compete with servraid and the likes found in servers. You dont have to reboot on every change and the bios that come with these disk controllers allow you to get out of trouble with no OS or boot disks around.
Servers keep things running. A company can lose $10,000 a day of downtime ( a small company mind you), so a single day of downtime will be more expensive for you if youre running a PC as a server. Sure PCs can perform well, especially given SCSI disks. But you can also find real cheap $500 servers out there with IDE disks which are hardly different from PCs. OTOH larger servers allow you to change a disk in a raid volume on the go without hardly a performance bump. You dont get 100ms of downtime. Thats worth real $$$ to some people.
And go higher, you can hotplug PCI, even CPUs and memory in mainframes. In fact with real logical partitions you can move a constantly running OS with apps in realtime to another server, without a burp. PCs can kick ass, give it an Athlon 64 FX60 or something, 500GB disk and you can say in raw resources it beats any server for the price. But companies still run AS/400s and VMS machines after 20 odd years in lieu of your FX-60, paying more $$$ simply because they keep running their businesses.