Is there any way to point yum at the Fedora RPMs so you don't have to manually download and install each RPM file?
Add the unstable repositories from the KDE for Red Hat project to/et/apt/sources.list. Do an 'apt-get update && apt-get ugrade', restart X and you should be off like a prom dress.
Although now that I think about it, I'm not sure if they have RPMs built yet. Go poke around their ftp server or wait a couple days and check. But I can say with 100% certainty that using apt (yum) and their repositories is by far the easiest way of getting a new verion of KDE on a/Red Hat|Fedora/ box.
I've been to SDSC a bunch of times (it's across campus from where I work). One time when I was there about two years ago, Tom Perrine gave me and a friend a tour of their datacenter. Towards the back, there are two big (and I mean BIG -- like "room-sized") tape libraries. In fact, it's the world's largest tape library. The servers that act as the cache for the libraries are in racks which run about 25 feet long. It's pretty impressive.
One of the libraries' uses was a project by a research guy there who aimed to store every possible combination of 8-character ASCII strings. I forget exactly how much storage space it took up, but it was quite a bit more than what you'd expect just from doing the numbers (they might have been storing metadata or something as well, I don't remember). Anyway, I do remember asking what they intended to do with the data: They wanted to use these to compute password hashes so they could crack passwords in near real-time. It looks like they finally got around to do it.
I haven't yet read their paper so I don't know if they used this data or not, but I'd believe them if they say they've computed all the crypt()-able hashes. Hopefully they'll put up a search interface so you can break your own password. They've got the computing horsepower to spare...
I'd probably go for one of the lower-powered CF-25s for a couple hundred. Actually, I'd buy three of them and use two for parts. If you're really in the market for a portable that does duty in hazardous conditions, you're probably not going to be doing video editing and such on it anyway, and might be able to get by with a P166 CPU.
Was it in a smaller font or something? Obfuscated somehow?
Seriously though, it looked like it was just one statement among many, and not exactly "hidden". Whether it's a step backward or not, I can't say; I've always lived in 7-bit ASCII-land.
Thanks for posting a link to those pics. I'm in Europe and my parents live about 3/4 of a mile from that intersection where the pictures were taken, and I have been searching for pictures close to home
Hey, if you want to email me with an address, I'd be more than happy to drive on out there (as close as I can get) and take a "roll" of digital pictures to put up on my web site. I'm off all day tomorrow so let me know.
I'm up in NorCal now, but I have to ask - why not leave for a few days anyway?
Honestly? I can't. Unless I have to I won't leave. My wife is the senior buyer for a company that got hit by the fires, so she pretty much has to go into work. (The chancellor has closed the university where I work.) And I have another reason for staying which I can't discuss here. But we're not in any real danger unless the winds head west for a while. We'll have some warning. If they call for "volunteer evacuations" we're gone. The mandatory evacuations are when the helicopters start coming over. Hopefully, there's some gap in between those two events.
So I'm pretty interested - what is the motivation to stick around?
I'd love to go to Phoenix and stay with my folks (my sister and her 3 young children left Long Beach for PHX today). A few neighbors have left. But even if I didn't have an unspecified reason to stay, or my wife's admirable work ethic to argue against, I'd probably still stay. You get this sense, like it's your house that is in danger. Like, where you're safest is being threatened, and that makes you anxious. But you're always safer at home -- or at least that's the feeling. So you have this flight/defense dichotomy in your head. Even though the smoke is pretty bad (I have bad allergies, my wife is getting over the flu), we're just sort of stoicly "defending" our home. We have a lot of effort tied up into this place, and, oddly, abandoning it feels like we'd be leaving a family member behind. It's a hard thing to describe. But leaving would be more traumatic than staying.
Look, we'll have some warning, and we are fully prepared to get out in style inside of 5 minutes. There are many ways out of this neighborhood, and I don't think we'd have trouble using lawns instead of roads if need be. But the fact is that even though it sort of sucks to be living here right now, this is where we live. And we're not in very much danger. I got spooked when I saw how far the fire had moved in 12 hours, then spooked some more when I could make out actual details in the billowing smoke to the East, but it's not been heading this way. San Diego also has resources coming in from all over, so there's more mitigation, if not outright containment coming as time goes on.
It's a somewhat irrational explanation, I know. I should make a few phone calls and cancel that unspecific committment, tell the wife that her health is suffering, and head for Arizona for a few days. But this is where we live. It's home. It's hard to explain.
My friend (he lives in Poway -- about 5 miles from where the fire was last night) went out with a buddy and took some pictures in his area Sunday night. The one with the purple flames is my favorite. (BTW, that web site -- a hobby of his -- is in no way safe for work; as long as you don't go up to the parent directory you should be fine.)
I live about 10-12 miles from the Cedar fire, in Rancho Penasquitos. There's ash everywhere, and the sun was orange today (I heard from a friend downtown who couldn't even see the sun). Traffic has been really light, and it's been generally spooky outside. I stayed up all last night waiting for the helicopters announcing the evacuation. They never came, but I wouldn't have been able to sleep anyway.
As far as preparations? My wife and I both have overnight bags packed and waiting to go. There's another backpack that has all our contact info (insurance, banks, etc.) in it, as well as our passports, birth certificates, etc. We've been meaning to get a safe deposit box for years now, but haven't. In the garage by the door I have a "portable" earthquake kit (basically a bunch of crap in crates) with 15 gallons of water, a couple cases of MREs, first aid kit, a water purification pump, blankets, gloves, chemical flashlights, batteries for the GPS and radio, and so on waiting to go. I've got a bag of food and a leash for the dog, face masks, a bag of pistols, and some ammo. In with the ammo is one of the hard drives from my home file server's RAID1 array. All that fits in my 4Runner. I think.
In getting all that ready to go yesterday, I realized that we'd have to leave a whole lot of stuff behind, but we'd at least be safe and reasonably well stocked. It's somewhat comforting. Even still, it's surreally depressing to be preparing to be a refugee in the U.S. in the 21st century. I don't think I'll forget this feeling for a while.
Why? I run both at the same time. Virtual PC is a good thing.
Emulation, generally speaking, is not. If you care about speed, that is.
You'd have to. Because two hot seconds later, Apple would be out of business.
At the risk of sounding like I'm laying out flamebait, this seems to fly in the face of the popular notion that Apple hardware has TCO close to Linux/*BSD/Wintel. You are saying that buyers of Apple hardware subsidize the cost of the OS development; the cost of admission to OS X is, in effect, the price of Apple hardware. So then whitebox (or small vendor/integrator) commodity hardware and an open source OS must therefore be cheaper up front by a wide margin. But I never said that Apple should give away the OS, just release it.
That's kind of the point, you see. Mac OS X is not a "Unixish desktop." It's only goal is to be the easiest-to-use operating system in the world. The fact that it also happens to be the most powerful is just icing.
You sound just slightly biased. Which is fine; everyone has their favorites. But you missed my point: if I have an entire organization filled with x86 hardware, where is the impetus to import a new architecture? How far out is my migration path? Is the change based on the strength of OS X alone? OS X may indeed be the most "powerful", but is that enough for me to suddenly bear the brunt of supporting a whole brand new flavor of hardware/vendors? Can I run any app/OS I want after I move?
Like I said, OS X is indeed nice. But it isn't nice enough to convince a CTO to effect such a sea change in his/her IT infrastructure. That has wider ramifications. And going back to my original point, that confines OS X to the role of something of a marginal player, whereas with Linux/*BSD, you can run a UNIXish OS or not, depending on your needs (with hardware requirements and other factors greatly simplified, of course).
And I'm only speaking from personal experience at the "you're the one that has to make it work" level, not the grand plan/CTO level, so grab as many grains of salt as you need when reading the above.
Red Hat have a great server OS, Apple have one for the desktop. Combine the 2 and it is impossible to beat.
I would really love to see the machine that can dual boot that combination.
If Apple would release a version of OS X for the x86(-64) architecture, I'd convert my desktop machines in a hot second -- as I'm sure many (multiple) tens of thousands of others would. But that will never happen, so I'm just going to use the one OS I already have on the wide range of hardware I already have purchased and amortizing.
It's a pity, really. OS X is nice. But not that nice. Red Hat, SuSE, et al. do just fine as a Unixish desktop. Red Hat in particular has a lot of commercial support, and indeed is giving Sun/SGI a run for their money in some areas. Commodity hardware and a (cheap) OS make a fairly attractive combination. It's easy to standardize hardware/vendors for nearly everything your CAD/VLSI/etc worksations to the secretaries' WinXP desktops. That can't happen so well if you have some Apples, some Intel, some SPARC, etc.
The Model M is an amazing keyboard. So is the model 42H1292. Both are heavy, and both feature the buckling spring switch under each key principle. Dan (from dansdata.com) reviews them here. He calls 'em "battleship boards", goes into the why they make such great keyboards. It's interesting reading, like pretty much most of what Dan writes.
IBM/Lexmark quit making them a while ago, so they are a little hard to find. He did manage to find a company here in the US that uses IBM's old tooling to manufacture new 42H1292 keyboards. They don't have the IBM logo, but they are apparently functionally identical to the IBMs. They're US$50, however.
I was inches away from buying one of the new units, and decided to do some searching before I threw down a hundred dollars. After some searching, I came across a company called IndexComputer that specializes in older OEM computer parts, specifically IBM parts (if you need port covers or whatever for an old ThinkPad, they're the people to talk to). They sell brand new 42H1292 keyboards for $20.
I bought one a couple weeks ago as a test. It's the real deal. Even smells like a pool toy. I'm using it now, actually. I went back and bought three more for a spare and for a couple other computers I have.
For $20 you can't go wrong with a 42H1292. If you really must have a Model M, IndexComputer sells those as well. They're US$50 though. I don't know if a plug-in cable is worth the extra US$30, but if you really have to get your hands on a true Model M, they're the people to talk to.
I emailed Brian (I don't have AIM) and got the location of his limited bandwidth packages. I put them on my server:
http://27.org/ssh/. I'll remove those files and redirect requests to Red Hat's errata page when they have official packages.
If using binaries/source from non-vendors weirds you out, you can also grab the RPMs for RH9, or the SRPMs for other releases (and presumeably other distros like SuSE, Mandrake, et al. as well) directly from the OpenBSD guys. The only US mirror which had them (as of this morning when I heard about the announcement) was ftp://ftp3.usa.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/OpenSSH/por table/rpm/. I didn't look through the international mirrors, but I got pretty good speeds from across the country.
I don't have any Peachpit books, but if you like small form factor, backpack-sized references try the Codenotes series of books. They're really small (roughly 5x8 inches), and get right to the point. They're very good references when you can't get to online sources. You need to have some passing familiarity with the material, however.
I have the XML and the Web-Based UI ones. They're both very handy to have around, and easier to carry than toting O'Reilly books everywhere. They also cover more ground than the O'Reilly "Pocket Reference" series tend to.
You want a Patriot 1 from AMREL. It meets MIL-STD 810F, which is an operating from 0C to 45C. Their extremely tough laptops. Not cheap, however, and not easy to get. But they're the best. A Panasonic Toughbook might work. They're not cheap either.
As far as TCO goes, you might just be better off buying 10 or 12 cheap Thinkpads from ebay. Get all the same (or close) model numbers. When one dies, pop out the hard drive and put it in another one. Or keep an OS image on a PC somewhere and load up the "new" laptop that way. Or image them all at the same time and keep your personal stuff on a network someplace. I'm not sure what exactly you need the portable for.
BTW, you can get cheap Toughbooks on ebay as well, as long as you don't mind running a slower processor.
Some of their stuff is 128k, some is higher quality.
It's variable bitrate, except for older stuff. At least from what I can tell anyway. I've only been a member for around 5 hours (thank you, BTW!). Long enough to fall in love with emusic.com. I grabbed some Django, some Frank Black, and a bunch of stuff I'd never heard before.
All the "older" stuff I've got so far (Billie Holiday, Arite Shaw, Django Reinhardt) is 128kbs. The "newer" stuff (The Future Sound Of London) is variable bitrate. Looks to be average like 190kbs.
I'm guessing anything that was mono to begin with is 128, anything else gets encoded VBR. They have a FAQ which helps some.
It's funny to think that people aren't as interested in stock-options after the bust. NOW is the time to get options, when prices are low, especially since there's no risk to the employee.
I couldn't agree more. Having a low strike price is very nice, especially if you plan on holding onto options for a long time.
That said, I generally think of stock options as if they're a gift of lottery tickets.
I think you've said it perfectly. I knew a lot of people who came to actually depend on their options. They treated them like they would income (or like a weird savings account). Many of them had trouble when the bubble burst.
A high-tech Fortune 500 company I started working for in 1997 gave me 1500 shares, with a 5 year vesting schedule. I was hired on as an entry-level associate engineer. The total value of the options nearly equaled my yearly salary. From talking to others, this was common at that time. A friend who recently got hired at this same company as a much more senior engineer was given 500 shares. From what I can gather, at some point around the market bust (~2000), the company cut its option plans by about 2/3. One mitigating factor might be that the stock split a few times, and that caused people to think about the stock price more than their job or the company as a whole. There was an unseemly "gold rush" mentality that caused quite a bit of pain for a lot of people. The company could have reacted to this. I don't know.
It seems that other companies are less likely to use options as the big enticement they were used as a few years ago. Most of the people I know got few if any stock options when they were hired. Six or eight years ago, it was almost expected in high-tech. I think the bubble popping had a lot to do with this. Whether it's a case of the prospective employee thinking that stock won't be worth anything, and is therefore valueless as a "benefit", or the employer wanting to use more directly obvious compensation, I don't know. Since it's a buyer's market, companies might not feel the need to use options as a lure.
Offhand, I'd say that if the company has a good 401(k) match, good health care, job security, and offers a reasonable or generous salary, treat any options you get as just a possible bonus later on down the road. Put another way, you shouldn't count on them being worth anything, and so they shouldn't factor in as compensation when deciding to take a job or not (don't give in to arguments like "Company A is giving more options, but Company B pays more..."). Although there are worse decisions to have to make, eh?
I while back, I was going to write an Open-Source clone called GNAA (GNAA's Not Axis & Allies)... unfortunately, that banner's been taken over by a variety of crapflooders here..
I don't know what GNAA means, but why not pick another leading letter? You could write it for Qt and call it KNAA (or QNAA even). The beauty of recursive acronyms is that you get to pick pretty much any leading letter.
I don't remember. It's been a long time since I played, so I don't know if I won or lost. I likely lost. I only played the analog version maybe four times, and so never got that good. Maybe I'll see if it runders under WINE...
In 1998, Hasbro Interactive made a version for the PC. I only played it a couple times, but it was a fairly decent game. The box says you can play online at zone.com. Oddly enough, there are 32 players online right now, so you might be able to find a match.
I don't know if this has been mentioned yet (it hasn't been in any of the messages visible at the threshhold I use, anyway), but you might do well to check out OpenAFS. It does exactly what you say you want. Here's a short description from that link:
AFS is a distributed filesystem product, pioneered at Carnegie Mellon University and supported and developed as a product by Transarc Corporation (now IBM Pittsburgh Labs). It offers a client-server architecture for file sharing, providing location independence, scalability and transparent migration capabilities for data.
I've used AFS for a while now on Linux and various Unixes, and it does very well (even under "heavy loads", like moving a couple various gigabytes around at the same time). I know it works on the various Windows flavors that you have (although I've never used it on Windows), Linux support is there, and a glance at their download page shows that they have a Mac OS X package. Now whether it's stable or usable or not, I can't tell you. But if you can get satisfied with the Mac implementation, the rest ought to be a slam dunk. You'll still be out in the cold with the MacOS 9 box, however. A single FTP daemon on that machine might not be too great a concession.
There might be a slight learning curve to overcome in getting it all set up and ready to use, but once you get it where you like it, you shouldn't have to worry about it anymore. And it sounds like your needs are not quite enterprise-level, so you likely wouldn't need to expose yourself to its entire feature set anyway. I'd say given the diverse hardware in your office/lab it fits the bill pretty closely.
This post is not a solicitation of legal advice: we have a very nice contract drawn up which is agreeable to both parties and which we will be signing shortly. We are looking for practical precautions or recommendations. If you have gone through the same type of deal, what would you do the same, or differently?
Sounds like you've already made your move. Why ask anyone here what they'd do differently if you've already done it?
If you have an issue with someone you mention it to a mutual co-worker/friend and they tell the person. Face is very important.
So then all you need is a corporate culture which supports the myth of "Hey, a friend says that you ought to be using more soap in the shower, if you get my drift...", right? If I have an issue with you, then that means your friend has an issue with you, as far as you know.
Nothing in life is free. Support costs money. Buying from a first tier vendor, like Dell, or like Apple, means you get someone to call at the very least, and if you pay for the privilege, someone to come out, on site, to replace the defective piece of hardware.
I completely agree with that statement, and the rationale behind it. If you go back and read what I originally wrote (the first paragraph), I was saying that companies who need computers to survive need to pay for that support. I also said that I, personally, don't need to pay for that support. I said that because I have the option of building white-box PCs, for me -- personally, then I can save money and get a lot more computer than if I paid Apple or Dell.
If I got a new life and became a person that set up office computing environments, I'd demand that they buy from a vendor who had support built into the cost of the hardware. That would, aside from being a very good idea, allow me to set up more offices and therefore make more money.
So enjoy the white box on your desk. Because you're going to be on unemployment soon.
Use white box hardware and go out of business? Are you saying that if I had an Apple on my desk I'd be able to keep my job? Your syllogism is serisouly flawed.
I work at a university, in the CS department. We have the most byzantine IT setup you could imagine. We not only have an IT staff, our "customers" -- the students and professors -- are an IT staff. And yes, we have a lot of Dells, and they have support contracts. We have Apples, too. And Sparcs. They have vendor support. And we have a lot of other frankenstein hardware laying around, some of which made it into a machine I use. So because it's not an Apple I'll be losing my job?
Slashdot Mirror
Add the unstable repositories from the KDE for Red Hat project to /et/apt/sources.list. Do an 'apt-get update && apt-get ugrade', restart X and you should be off like a prom dress.
Although now that I think about it, I'm not sure if they have RPMs built yet. Go poke around their ftp server or wait a couple days and check. But I can say with 100% certainty that using apt (yum) and their repositories is by far the easiest way of getting a new verion of KDE on a /Red Hat|Fedora/ box.
-B
One of the libraries' uses was a project by a research guy there who aimed to store every possible combination of 8-character ASCII strings. I forget exactly how much storage space it took up, but it was quite a bit more than what you'd expect just from doing the numbers (they might have been storing metadata or something as well, I don't remember). Anyway, I do remember asking what they intended to do with the data: They wanted to use these to compute password hashes so they could crack passwords in near real-time. It looks like they finally got around to do it.
I haven't yet read their paper so I don't know if they used this data or not, but I'd believe them if they say they've computed all the crypt()-able hashes. Hopefully they'll put up a search interface so you can break your own password. They've got the computing horsepower to spare...
-B
You can get them on ebay for around $2,000. You can also buy them new in the $3K - $4K range.
I'd probably go for one of the lower-powered CF-25s for a couple hundred. Actually, I'd buy three of them and use two for parts. If you're really in the market for a portable that does duty in hazardous conditions, you're probably not going to be doing video editing and such on it anyway, and might be able to get by with a P166 CPU.
-B
Was it in a smaller font or something? Obfuscated somehow?
Seriously though, it looked like it was just one statement among many, and not exactly "hidden". Whether it's a step backward or not, I can't say; I've always lived in 7-bit ASCII-land.
-B
Hey, if you want to email me with an address, I'd be more than happy to drive on out there (as close as I can get) and take a "roll" of digital pictures to put up on my web site. I'm off all day tomorrow so let me know.
-B
Honestly? I can't. Unless I have to I won't leave. My wife is the senior buyer for a company that got hit by the fires, so she pretty much has to go into work. (The chancellor has closed the university where I work.) And I have another reason for staying which I can't discuss here. But we're not in any real danger unless the winds head west for a while. We'll have some warning. If they call for "volunteer evacuations" we're gone. The mandatory evacuations are when the helicopters start coming over. Hopefully, there's some gap in between those two events.
So I'm pretty interested - what is the motivation to stick around?
I'd love to go to Phoenix and stay with my folks (my sister and her 3 young children left Long Beach for PHX today). A few neighbors have left. But even if I didn't have an unspecified reason to stay, or my wife's admirable work ethic to argue against, I'd probably still stay. You get this sense, like it's your house that is in danger. Like, where you're safest is being threatened, and that makes you anxious. But you're always safer at home -- or at least that's the feeling. So you have this flight/defense dichotomy in your head. Even though the smoke is pretty bad (I have bad allergies, my wife is getting over the flu), we're just sort of stoicly "defending" our home. We have a lot of effort tied up into this place, and, oddly, abandoning it feels like we'd be leaving a family member behind. It's a hard thing to describe. But leaving would be more traumatic than staying.
Look, we'll have some warning, and we are fully prepared to get out in style inside of 5 minutes. There are many ways out of this neighborhood, and I don't think we'd have trouble using lawns instead of roads if need be. But the fact is that even though it sort of sucks to be living here right now, this is where we live. And we're not in very much danger. I got spooked when I saw how far the fire had moved in 12 hours, then spooked some more when I could make out actual details in the billowing smoke to the East, but it's not been heading this way. San Diego also has resources coming in from all over, so there's more mitigation, if not outright containment coming as time goes on.
It's a somewhat irrational explanation, I know. I should make a few phone calls and cancel that unspecific committment, tell the wife that her health is suffering, and head for Arizona for a few days. But this is where we live. It's home. It's hard to explain.
-B
My friend (he lives in Poway -- about 5 miles from where the fire was last night) went out with a buddy and took some pictures in his area Sunday night. The one with the purple flames is my favorite. (BTW, that web site -- a hobby of his -- is in no way safe for work; as long as you don't go up to the parent directory you should be fine.)
I live about 10-12 miles from the Cedar fire, in Rancho Penasquitos. There's ash everywhere, and the sun was orange today (I heard from a friend downtown who couldn't even see the sun). Traffic has been really light, and it's been generally spooky outside. I stayed up all last night waiting for the helicopters announcing the evacuation. They never came, but I wouldn't have been able to sleep anyway.
As far as preparations? My wife and I both have overnight bags packed and waiting to go. There's another backpack that has all our contact info (insurance, banks, etc.) in it, as well as our passports, birth certificates, etc. We've been meaning to get a safe deposit box for years now, but haven't. In the garage by the door I have a "portable" earthquake kit (basically a bunch of crap in crates) with 15 gallons of water, a couple cases of MREs, first aid kit, a water purification pump, blankets, gloves, chemical flashlights, batteries for the GPS and radio, and so on waiting to go. I've got a bag of food and a leash for the dog, face masks, a bag of pistols, and some ammo. In with the ammo is one of the hard drives from my home file server's RAID1 array. All that fits in my 4Runner. I think.
In getting all that ready to go yesterday, I realized that we'd have to leave a whole lot of stuff behind, but we'd at least be safe and reasonably well stocked. It's somewhat comforting. Even still, it's surreally depressing to be preparing to be a refugee in the U.S. in the 21st century. I don't think I'll forget this feeling for a while.
-B
Emulation, generally speaking, is not. If you care about speed, that is.
You'd have to. Because two hot seconds later, Apple would be out of business.
At the risk of sounding like I'm laying out flamebait, this seems to fly in the face of the popular notion that Apple hardware has TCO close to Linux/*BSD/Wintel. You are saying that buyers of Apple hardware subsidize the cost of the OS development; the cost of admission to OS X is, in effect, the price of Apple hardware. So then whitebox (or small vendor/integrator) commodity hardware and an open source OS must therefore be cheaper up front by a wide margin. But I never said that Apple should give away the OS, just release it.
That's kind of the point, you see. Mac OS X is not a "Unixish desktop." It's only goal is to be the easiest-to-use operating system in the world. The fact that it also happens to be the most powerful is just icing.
You sound just slightly biased. Which is fine; everyone has their favorites. But you missed my point: if I have an entire organization filled with x86 hardware, where is the impetus to import a new architecture? How far out is my migration path? Is the change based on the strength of OS X alone? OS X may indeed be the most "powerful", but is that enough for me to suddenly bear the brunt of supporting a whole brand new flavor of hardware/vendors? Can I run any app/OS I want after I move?
Like I said, OS X is indeed nice. But it isn't nice enough to convince a CTO to effect such a sea change in his/her IT infrastructure. That has wider ramifications. And going back to my original point, that confines OS X to the role of something of a marginal player, whereas with Linux/*BSD, you can run a UNIXish OS or not, depending on your needs (with hardware requirements and other factors greatly simplified, of course).
And I'm only speaking from personal experience at the "you're the one that has to make it work" level, not the grand plan/CTO level, so grab as many grains of salt as you need when reading the above.
-B
I would really love to see the machine that can dual boot that combination.
If Apple would release a version of OS X for the x86(-64) architecture, I'd convert my desktop machines in a hot second -- as I'm sure many (multiple) tens of thousands of others would. But that will never happen, so I'm just going to use the one OS I already have on the wide range of hardware I already have purchased and amortizing.
It's a pity, really. OS X is nice. But not that nice. Red Hat, SuSE, et al. do just fine as a Unixish desktop. Red Hat in particular has a lot of commercial support, and indeed is giving Sun/SGI a run for their money in some areas. Commodity hardware and a (cheap) OS make a fairly attractive combination. It's easy to standardize hardware/vendors for nearly everything your CAD/VLSI/etc worksations to the secretaries' WinXP desktops. That can't happen so well if you have some Apples, some Intel, some SPARC, etc.
-B
-B
And here I thought Tru64 was dead.
-B
The Model M is an amazing keyboard. So is the model 42H1292. Both are heavy, and both feature the buckling spring switch under each key principle. Dan (from dansdata.com) reviews them here. He calls 'em "battleship boards", goes into the why they make such great keyboards. It's interesting reading, like pretty much most of what Dan writes.
IBM/Lexmark quit making them a while ago, so they are a little hard to find. He did manage to find a company here in the US that uses IBM's old tooling to manufacture new 42H1292 keyboards. They don't have the IBM logo, but they are apparently functionally identical to the IBMs. They're US$50, however.
I was inches away from buying one of the new units, and decided to do some searching before I threw down a hundred dollars. After some searching, I came across a company called IndexComputer that specializes in older OEM computer parts, specifically IBM parts (if you need port covers or whatever for an old ThinkPad, they're the people to talk to). They sell brand new 42H1292 keyboards for $20.
I bought one a couple weeks ago as a test. It's the real deal. Even smells like a pool toy. I'm using it now, actually. I went back and bought three more for a spare and for a couple other computers I have.
For $20 you can't go wrong with a 42H1292. If you really must have a Model M, IndexComputer sells those as well. They're US$50 though. I don't know if a plug-in cable is worth the extra US$30, but if you really have to get your hands on a true Model M, they're the people to talk to.
-B
If using binaries/source from non-vendors weirds you out, you can also grab the RPMs for RH9, or the SRPMs for other releases (and presumeably other distros like SuSE, Mandrake, et al. as well) directly from the OpenBSD guys. The only US mirror which had them (as of this morning when I heard about the announcement) was ftp://ftp3.usa.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/OpenSSH/por table/rpm/. I didn't look through the international mirrors, but I got pretty good speeds from across the country.
-B
I have the XML and the Web-Based UI ones. They're both very handy to have around, and easier to carry than toting O'Reilly books everywhere. They also cover more ground than the O'Reilly "Pocket Reference" series tend to.
-B
As far as TCO goes, you might just be better off buying 10 or 12 cheap Thinkpads from ebay. Get all the same (or close) model numbers. When one dies, pop out the hard drive and put it in another one. Or keep an OS image on a PC somewhere and load up the "new" laptop that way. Or image them all at the same time and keep your personal stuff on a network someplace. I'm not sure what exactly you need the portable for.
BTW, you can get cheap Toughbooks on ebay as well, as long as you don't mind running a slower processor.
-B
It's variable bitrate, except for older stuff. At least from what I can tell anyway. I've only been a member for around 5 hours (thank you, BTW!). Long enough to fall in love with emusic.com. I grabbed some Django, some Frank Black, and a bunch of stuff I'd never heard before.
All the "older" stuff I've got so far (Billie Holiday, Arite Shaw, Django Reinhardt) is 128kbs. The "newer" stuff (The Future Sound Of London) is variable bitrate. Looks to be average like 190kbs.
I'm guessing anything that was mono to begin with is 128, anything else gets encoded VBR. They have a FAQ which helps some.
-B
I couldn't agree more. Having a low strike price is very nice, especially if you plan on holding onto options for a long time.
That said, I generally think of stock options as if they're a gift of lottery tickets.
I think you've said it perfectly. I knew a lot of people who came to actually depend on their options. They treated them like they would income (or like a weird savings account). Many of them had trouble when the bubble burst.
-B
It seems that other companies are less likely to use options as the big enticement they were used as a few years ago. Most of the people I know got few if any stock options when they were hired. Six or eight years ago, it was almost expected in high-tech. I think the bubble popping had a lot to do with this. Whether it's a case of the prospective employee thinking that stock won't be worth anything, and is therefore valueless as a "benefit", or the employer wanting to use more directly obvious compensation, I don't know. Since it's a buyer's market, companies might not feel the need to use options as a lure.
Offhand, I'd say that if the company has a good 401(k) match, good health care, job security, and offers a reasonable or generous salary, treat any options you get as just a possible bonus later on down the road. Put another way, you shouldn't count on them being worth anything, and so they shouldn't factor in as compensation when deciding to take a job or not (don't give in to arguments like "Company A is giving more options, but Company B pays more..."). Although there are worse decisions to have to make, eh?
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I don't know what GNAA means, but why not pick another leading letter? You could write it for Qt and call it KNAA (or QNAA even). The beauty of recursive acronyms is that you get to pick pretty much any leading letter.
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I don't remember. It's been a long time since I played, so I don't know if I won or lost. I likely lost. I only played the analog version maybe four times, and so never got that good. Maybe I'll see if it runders under WINE...
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Looks like you can buy a copy on ebay for about US$10.
-B
I've used AFS for a while now on Linux and various Unixes, and it does very well (even under "heavy loads", like moving a couple various gigabytes around at the same time). I know it works on the various Windows flavors that you have (although I've never used it on Windows), Linux support is there, and a glance at their download page shows that they have a Mac OS X package. Now whether it's stable or usable or not, I can't tell you. But if you can get satisfied with the Mac implementation, the rest ought to be a slam dunk. You'll still be out in the cold with the MacOS 9 box, however. A single FTP daemon on that machine might not be too great a concession.
There might be a slight learning curve to overcome in getting it all set up and ready to use, but once you get it where you like it, you shouldn't have to worry about it anymore. And it sounds like your needs are not quite enterprise-level, so you likely wouldn't need to expose yourself to its entire feature set anyway. I'd say given the diverse hardware in your office/lab it fits the bill pretty closely.
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Sounds like you've already made your move. Why ask anyone here what they'd do differently if you've already done it?
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So then all you need is a corporate culture which supports the myth of "Hey, a friend says that you ought to be using more soap in the shower, if you get my drift...", right? If I have an issue with you, then that means your friend has an issue with you, as far as you know.
-B
I completely agree with that statement, and the rationale behind it. If you go back and read what I originally wrote (the first paragraph), I was saying that companies who need computers to survive need to pay for that support. I also said that I, personally, don't need to pay for that support. I said that because I have the option of building white-box PCs, for me -- personally, then I can save money and get a lot more computer than if I paid Apple or Dell.
If I got a new life and became a person that set up office computing environments, I'd demand that they buy from a vendor who had support built into the cost of the hardware. That would, aside from being a very good idea, allow me to set up more offices and therefore make more money.
So enjoy the white box on your desk. Because you're going to be on unemployment soon.
Use white box hardware and go out of business? Are you saying that if I had an Apple on my desk I'd be able to keep my job? Your syllogism is serisouly flawed.
I work at a university, in the CS department. We have the most byzantine IT setup you could imagine. We not only have an IT staff, our "customers" -- the students and professors -- are an IT staff. And yes, we have a lot of Dells, and they have support contracts. We have Apples, too. And Sparcs. They have vendor support. And we have a lot of other frankenstein hardware laying around, some of which made it into a machine I use. So because it's not an Apple I'll be losing my job?
-B