1 Server, 1 Admin - Build from source 5 Servers, 1 Admin - Build Packages and install 1 Server, 5 Admins - Use Standard Packages 5 Servers, 5 Admins - Build Packages with custom names/versions and install
Seriously, I have 7 Admins managing a mix of 160 Servers. The simplest way I've found to have the best of both worlds, is to D/L the source RPM (SRPM), customize to taste, modify name slightly, rebuild, and distribute.
For instance, Needed customized apache to support a couple of things we're doing. D/L apache SRPM Modify config files with our own patch modify configure line in SPEC file to suit modify package name (!Important!) rebuild uninstall old packages install our packages WA-LA
Advantages - still get to run up2date/autorpm/fav-update-package with no worries of breaking your own custom stuff - Know which packages you've mod-ed by running rpm -q -a | grep "myinitials" or whatever.
Disadvantage - Auto Update doesn't fix the stuff you're behind on...gotta keep up!
This isn't one of my more favorite topics, but, since it's clearly important to you, and presumably this kid is worth it, I'm going to spend some time this evening and write about a few of my experiences growing up. *Maybe*, if you're lucky, you'll find a better solution to this than "He has to find his own way"
I was identified at age 5 as a gifted student. After a brief and demoralizing year switching schools and climbing my way back up, I moved into those advanced classes again, and was moved into a gifted program in 5th grade (The first year a separate program was available in my school system). To add to my separation from my classmates, I have worn glasses since age 4, and can't see more than fuzzy shapes 18 inches away without them.
When I say separation from my classmates, I mean specifically the majority not in the gifted classes. Being one of 5 people culled out of 200 (small town, I know) makes you one step above special ed kids in the social order.
Teachers, take note, public praise in class for those students that do well is a good thing, to some extent. However, excessive use of encouragement in several grades served to draw attention to our difference from our classmates. There is such a thing as too much encouragement, too publicly.
One might think we'd band together. However, that wasn't exactly the case. 5 headstrong kids with wildly different interests doesn't exactly work. Oh we'd try, but to some extent it was merely that we didn't exclude each other, rather than that we were close or included one another.
Gifted class instructors seemed much more intent on focusing on maximizing our future potential and SAT scores 8 years out than on teaching us effective communication and interpersonal skills. In retrospect, study of politics and the acquisition of power probably would have been a more effective motivator as a reason to learn social skills.
But I digress. I got lucky. My father finally struck upon a plan to get me more involved in team activities, with a motivator I could understand.
Air Force Junior ROTC in high school. Laugh if you will, but here's the motivator. If you want to go to college, you have to have money, be particularly outstanding, or be financially disadvantaged. Unfortunately, my family was essentially lower middle class, made too much on paper to get much financial aid, and made too little to afford it. Most small business owners in rural america fall into this category.
So, know what you have to do to get into a military academy? You have (or had at that time) to be sponsored, usually by a state senator or representative. For some people, this happens behind the scenes because of thier scores, others have to apply, and find someone to sponsor them. But, to get in on merit, there is one scholarship, and sponsorship, available per year from each ROTC school.
So, by excelling, I had an opportunity to go to a truly good school. Hence my enrollment in ROTC.
Now for the lucky part. I made a lifelong friend, joined the drill team, and learned, in a structured environment, how to deal with others in my age group. How to work in a team, and how to develop my leadership skills.
My friend, to whom I am eternally grateful, took me out, taught me to drink beer, smoke, a variety of other things, and challenged me in ways I hadn't been challenged.
Oh, I'd played baseball (badly, poor depth perception) and swim team (slowly, good stamina though, 400 meter medley), but those were challenges my brain could only help so much with.
No, conquering fear, that was the challenge game we were into. My friend took me to a set of cliffs, dropped a rope over the side, and taught me to rappel. He and another buddy taught me to ride a motorcycle. Then we got into motorcross. The variety of reckless dares taken based on the "No Balls" motivator was staggering in retrospect.
Now these were sports! Things I could do that took physical exertion, but required significant nerve and concentration. Chall
I realize that there are fairly stringent requirements for creating a proveably reverse engineered product, such as, say, an x86 compatible processor complete with MMX, etc. However, it has been done by more than one company....
So somebody please inform this reverse engineering layman, how exactly is a reverse engineered FAT filesystem layer any different from a reverse engineered processor? Why is FAT suddenly a candidate for licensing and patent infringement, if processors aren't?
First IANAL....
However, I have to service more than my fair share of DMCA Takedown requests...So I've actually read the text a few times.
I would think there are at least a few violations here:
1. Defeat of a "technological measure" to "control access" to a work protected under the DMCA, where the technological measure to control access consists of FTP and Web sites the world over to ensure it remains free?
2. Change of "Copyright Management Information".
Would SCO's change in IP Licensing consitute a change in the copyright management information made without the consent of the actual copyright owner?
3. Whether the GPL itself is enforcable or not, would it seem the individual authors and copyright owners would still have cause for relief under the portions pertaining to the change in Copyright Management Information and "Terms and conditions for use of the work." ?
4. Couldn't this also satisfy the commercial advantage portion in the "Criminal offenses and penalties" Section? At $500,000 + 5 years imprisonment for the first offense, and $1,000,000 and 10 years for the second, couldn't SCO's exec's be in big trouble if any of my questions above are correct?
On the other hand, SCO seems to be selling for about $17/share, with 13.8M shares outstanding.
By my calculations, we'd need about 1,000,000 open source adherents to chip in $134 apeice, and we could stage our own hostile takeover...anyone know if this would be kosher with the SEC?
Speaking as a Pro-Linux Manager in a university environment, money talks....the trick here is to show savings that exceed the switching costs.
The hardest past is to put a price tag on "soft dollars". Some things need to be done to make it happen right.
Costs 1. CIS instructor retraining Develop training and perform for 2,3,4 below 2. Faculty Retraining Necessary to aid in 3,4 below Will require new lesson plans or updates, screenshots, etc. 3. Staff Retraining Trails 1 and 2 because it will take time to switch administrative systems. 4. Student Retraining Happens by 2 above as part of normal classes 5. Alternative Package purchases
Recommendations: 1. There's some training out there already, including StarOffice training provided by Sun 2. Get IBM, Sun, and Oracle onboard to help plan, supply, and rollout. They will probably jump at the chance to move an entire university, as a model for other universities and businesses. 3. Sun has training (see #1 above) and trainers for staroffice that could do large on-site training. 4. IBM has trainers who can do large onsite training at a very nominal cost for large groups, get them to donate some and pay for the rest. 5. Oracle has training, administrative ERP packages aimed at university management, etc. as well as Linux training and Support.
6.Ask Alumn for time frame for switching....you're looking at a 2-3 year project for the administrative systems, unless you get IBM/Sun/Oracle to supply a small army of consultants, trainers, etc.
7. Try to put a number on "soft dollars" i.e. "Look how much time and personnel costs we can save by moving to reliable, managable servers and desktops..."
8. Discuss the future of IT and business, desktop, and home users. MS may be in use today, but that's chainging faster than most MS fans would like to admit. People are hiring Linux users NOW... Also, contrary to popular MS fan beliefs...Linux users can run MS with a minimum of trouble... The reverse is not as true.
1. She sleeps, therefore, motion sensors, retinal scanners, etc are out...REM sleep would set them off, and head attitude would make it very tricky to make it reliable.
2. She sleeps, therefore, working off hand movement, you would like it to be fairly descriminating...too many false alarms, too sensitive, etc, and you have "The little boy who cried wolf". a Few nights of being awakened 40 times and the hubby will be sleeping right through it.
So... How about this as an idea to build upon...
Get a small cheap watch with an alarm, preferably load beeper and annoying. Take out the guts, saving the battery and speaker/buzzer/beeper.
Run two wires from a hole in the case to a finger. on the finger, velcro a mercury switch which you've attached the two leads to.
These two wires then attached to a couple of cheap IC's. The first, a counter and timer, set up such that it requires 3+ "movements" within 30 seconds to latch an output voltage.
The second IC works as a switch. Wire the output to the beeper (prolly will require a driver circuit to make it beep if it is only a simple speaker type). On the output as well, wire a feedback line to the input of your switch IC, through a normally closed momentary contact button mounted on the case (like in place of one of the buttons formerly occupied by the watch buttons). This way, once triggered by your movement, the beeper wil continue to sound after the timer/detector circuit resets, until such time as the hubby presses the momentary contact button to cut off your feedback line.
The IC's and etc could be picked up at radio shack, and the circuits I first built when I was about 9 or 10 in one of those learning electronics experiment kits RS used to sell.
If you're interested in this, drop me a line and we'll see what we can come up with for details. There's prolly something better than a mercury switch for motion detection, but its late and I'm headed to bed.
Global Filesystem or some equivalent method for allowing simultaneous access by multiple systems to the same physical filesystems.
Improved traffic management facilities, preferably class based queuing, with some better user space tools for managing it(yes, I know the tools aren't really a part of the kernel)
ACL's ACL's ACL's!!!!!!
Shared memory architecture integrated with stock kernel for clustering. Would aid greatly in HA systems.
Quotas. Improved quotas that happen at the VFS layer, rather than in the actual fs layer would be dandy. Even better would be combining such a system with the Shared Memory architecture mentioned above thereby simplifying clustered solutions.
Hooks allowing online filesystem checks as much as possible.
I'm certain there are more, but those are the ones currently most needed in the enterprise area as I see it.
Essentially, our existing policy states that if the school requests an employee, faculty, staff, or grad assistant specifically writes a piece of code, literature, work product, etc. the school then owns it.
However, the school recognizes that students, grad assistants, faculty, and staff do a significant amount of personal research, writing, publication, etc. Unless the university has provided "substantial support" the author is the owner.
"Substantial support" in this context specifically does not include use of computer equipment, office supplies, office space normally assigned, etc.
That said, there are those in the administration who are realizing that this stuff is worth money, and are trying to change this policy to be more in line with the corporate philosiphy that says "You're employed here, you created it, on your own time or not, we own it."
There are obviously, a number of us who are fighting this, albeit with a certain limited success ( translate - they nod and smile, then go back to writing up thier new policy).
Good Luck, I hope more people will take a stand for what should be thier own intellectual property, and maybe we can reverse this creeping corporatism trend.
I'm so ashamed for letting you "get my goat", but I'll lower my self and respond to this flame bait.
IE is not "clearly the better browser"
Not even close in fact.
You see, there are features other than bells and whistles that count.
Reliability
Adherence to standards
Functionality
Interoperability
Nope, sorry.....
Netscape in general does a better job than IE in all of the above categories.
If there are problems with Netscape 6....then by all means, lets get them fixed, since that *IS* after all, what a beta test is all about!
While these aren't the best solution, they are more fairly reliable, more so than floppies at least.
We've had an initiative on campus to purchase all Lab and Classroom systems with internal zip drives. It has worked well. We provide students with space on our servers as well, about 10MB. This isn't enough for any significant number of large documents or powerpoint presentations.
Zip disks have done an admirable job of solving this problem. It gives students a way to archive the files from thier network space once they are done with it, and gives them a place to store files larger than those allowed within the 10MB.
I'd look at this one again if I were you. It's practical and works reasonably well.
I have gone through similar problems with major vendors as well. One major vendor actually required one of the techs to install NT over Linux to prove the HARDWARE problem wasn't linux, even though they claim (loudly) to support linux.
We evaluated 3 other vendors at that point.
Didn't see a single sales rep from any other vendor, even though we buy $150k+ of servers every year, and 300k+ of workstations.
Except IBM.
IBM showed up with a sales rep, and a support engineer to demo the units. Left 3 with us to test for 2 months!!!, and we called support whenever we needed. We didn't however, call any 1-800-go-away numbers...we had/have the phone and cell number of the support engineer for our area.
We decided on IBM.
the first order, they checked, found a couple of errors, and called with 3 questions on it.
They worked with our vendor (state contract) to get us the stuff in short order.
Now that we are buying from them, we have:
The telephone, fax, pager, email, cell phone, etc for both the sales rep, AND THE SUPPORT ENGINEER.
I haven't spoken to some generic so-and-so since we started buying from them.
I haven't ever had them complain about our distributions, or the things we are doing.
In fact, I've been overjoyed by thier support.
And the online pricing and server configuration stuff at thier website makes spec'ing servers for projects a breeze.
I strongly recommend you speak with them.
If anyone is particularly interested in speaking with our specific sales rep, drop me a line, and I'll send you her email and phone, etc.
I actually hit the wrong speed dial on Christmas Eve, and got the sales rep on her cell phone. She answered!!!!
Steven Walker
Network Systems Coordinator
Central Missouri State University
swalker@cmsu1.cmsu.edu
As usual, the opinions expressed are my own, and not necessarily those of my employer.
I work as a Network Administrator for a middlin sized university. I assure you that Linux is hardly the only OS/product with vendor support issues.
If you deal with any kind of large numbers of servers and workstations, network equipment, etc, you'll find the vendors really love to play the finger pointing game.
We've spent as long as 4 months of staff time doing packet captures to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that a vendor had problems with a certain backbone switch. After the product was discontinued, they released internal memos and technotes which revealed they had known about the problem internally for months prior to our experience with it. But it was cheaper for them to point fingers, than to replace the equipment with updated fixed models.
The only real defense against this is to cease buying from that vendor, and tell them the reason why. It isn't good enough to just tell the salesman....that will never get back to anyone in design or management. You'll have to send a message to customer service, or the managment, or both.
I can't of course name any names for fear of retribution...(not from the vendor, but from my superiors who are typically far more concerned about appearances, than the realities of what works and what deosn't.)
However, you'll find that a number of highly prominent vendors/manufacturers will play the same games, not just with Linux support, but with support of any kind.
Example: A friend ordered a new laptop, with (ugh!) W2K and a DVD in March. So far delivered and returned: Win98 with a CD Win 95 with a DVD NT4.0 with a cd NT 4.0 with a DVD
After that one he went off on the VP of Marketing for the company who told him that W2K was a free upgrade from NT4, just go to this web page and fill out form XXX. Upon arrival at the web page, the offer for free upgrade had expired 30APR2000....well after the original shipment, but too late to help now. He shipped it back on Monday....we'll see how long it takes to get it back.
In this case, the company really blew it. He had reasons for wanting that particular laptop...and so, is holding out for it. Unfortunately for the aforementioned company, he's also responsible for ordering PC's for the company where he works....that companies contract was not renewed....and another is now selling him 500+ PC's per year.
Don't take the crap....just send it back, and tell them in no uncertain terms, this is not acceptable, and you're taking your business to company XXX instead.
Well, I'm a Network Systems Coordinator (Fancy title for Jack-Of-All-Trades/Highest Geek not in pure management) at CMSU in Warrensburg. I read slashdot, freshmeat, and linux.com with a frequency that borders on religous fanaticism. I work full time on Network Administration, System Administration of Linux clusters, and in-house development of various linux-based apps.
I've never heard of this thing. We've got 4 other people who work directly for me on Linux development, a CS department who teaches on Linux workstations, a local LUG, numerous linux devotees, and lots more wannabees, I listen to a KC radio station daily, and during the day via the net, and not one said BOO about this thing.
I will concientously copy this to the organizer. I have to say...had we known, I could be fairly certain of at least 2 fully paid attendees, and probably a number of others for 1-2 days, just from my department alone. At least three vendors who normally ask if I'm going to this or that expo/trade show/etc have spoken to me in the last few weeks, and nothing from them either.
This can not possibly have been publicized worth diddly. Sorry, hope you didn't lose your butt, but next year, better tell someone about it.
- Apple only company other than Windows with a viable consumer operating system.
WRONG - Symantics aside (viable is not the same thing as wildly successful) There are a number of othr operating systems currently available to consumers. Linux is but one example, the list goes on for quite some time.
- He [Jobs] thrills the crowd with demos of Aqua, QuickTime, and simplicity of FireWire and USB
WRONG - Sorry Charlie....you seem to have taken an overly simplistic view of the support situation here. Apple has always had drivers that worked for (...insert device type here...) because they stuck to only a VERY limited number of manufacturers. Once you hit the PC world, there are larger numbers of chipsets for Firewire, USB, etc to support. It's not gonna be an overnight, we support everything, kind of migration. Apple would be starting from ground zero and climbing back up writing device drivers just as Linux has done to support these large number of devices/manufacturers.
- Millions of Windows users tired of IRQ conflicts
WRONG again Charlie. The mere fact that Mac OS X is installed will neither resolve the conflicts, nor will it do away with the necessity of IRQ's on the Intel platforms. The reason Apple has not had such problems with conflicts is because of the limited number of slots, and limited number of add-on boards to fit those slots.
- The vast majority of computer users--even professionals--want nothing to do with a command line. Witness the earlier success of Windows NT
WRONG - once again, it would seem you have critically misunderstood the issue. Windows NT is/was not a success because the Networking/Server/PC professionals liked a GUI better. It was/is a success becuase MS has successfully marketed it to the Management in most organizations. They have sold them by touting it as the only way to... and by telling them it has a lower TCO. Basically, they've implied that with the point-and-click interface, Management doesn't need to hire highly trained individuals, anyone should be able to handle the basics. On the other hand, even for those of us who originally liked NT3.51/4 most professionals I know spend most of their time back at the command line. Who wants to point-and-click thier way through updating 5000 accounts? In short, the GUI sold things to management, not the people who actually do the vast majority of the work.
-Linux has little to offer that Unix hasn't offered for years
WRONG - Boy, the hits just keep on comin... Sadly mistaken/misinformed once again. Linux offers something that Unix has not offered since the very early days of development. It offers the best and brightest minds with a combined experience of centuries (maybe even millenia) all working together for no other primary purpose than to build the best, most advanced and technically superior operating system ever known to mankind. Its the opportunity for the best and brightest to bring in what they want to see, thier new ideas, and old conecpts implemented right, to an OS that will accept thier developement efforts, and laud them (not the companies, the programmers!) for thier efforts. In short, it has rapidly risen to a level of excellence in every aspect that was hard to envision in it's early years.
Slashdot Mirror
1 Server, 1 Admin - Build from source
5 Servers, 1 Admin - Build Packages and install
1 Server, 5 Admins - Use Standard Packages
5 Servers, 5 Admins - Build Packages with custom names/versions and install
Seriously, I have 7 Admins managing a mix of 160 Servers.
The simplest way I've found to have the best of both worlds, is to D/L the source RPM (SRPM), customize to taste, modify name slightly, rebuild, and distribute.
For instance,
Needed customized apache to support a couple of things we're doing.
D/L apache SRPM
Modify config files with our own patch
modify configure line in SPEC file to suit
modify package name (!Important!)
rebuild
uninstall old packages
install our packages
WA-LA
Advantages
- still get to run up2date/autorpm/fav-update-package with no worries of breaking your own custom stuff
- Know which packages you've mod-ed by running rpm -q -a | grep "myinitials" or whatever.
Disadvantage
- Auto Update doesn't fix the stuff you're behind on...gotta keep up!
This isn't one of my more favorite topics, but, since it's clearly important to you, and presumably this kid is worth it, I'm going to spend some time this evening and write about a few of my experiences growing up. *Maybe*, if you're lucky, you'll find a better solution to this than "He has to find his own way"
I was identified at age 5 as a gifted student. After a brief and demoralizing year switching schools and climbing my way back up, I moved into those advanced classes again, and was moved into a gifted program in 5th grade (The first year a separate program was available in my school system). To add to my separation from my classmates, I have worn glasses since age 4, and can't see more than fuzzy shapes 18 inches away without them.
When I say separation from my classmates, I mean specifically the majority not in the gifted classes. Being one of 5 people culled out of 200 (small town, I know) makes you one step above special ed kids in the social order.
Teachers, take note, public praise in class for those students that do well is a good thing, to some extent. However, excessive use of encouragement in several grades served to draw attention to our difference from our classmates. There is such a thing as too much encouragement, too publicly.
One might think we'd band together. However, that wasn't exactly the case. 5 headstrong kids with wildly different interests doesn't exactly work. Oh we'd try, but to some extent it was merely that we didn't exclude each other, rather than that we were close or included one another.
Gifted class instructors seemed much more intent on focusing on maximizing our future potential and SAT scores 8 years out than on teaching us effective communication and interpersonal skills. In retrospect, study of politics and the acquisition of power probably would have been a more effective motivator as a reason to learn social skills.
But I digress. I got lucky. My father finally struck upon a plan to get me more involved in team activities, with a motivator I could understand.
Air Force Junior ROTC in high school. Laugh if you will, but here's the motivator.
If you want to go to college, you have to have money, be particularly outstanding, or be financially disadvantaged. Unfortunately, my family was essentially lower middle class, made too much on paper to get much financial aid, and made too little to afford it. Most small business owners in rural america fall into this category.
So, know what you have to do to get into a military academy? You have (or had at that time) to be sponsored, usually by a state senator or representative. For some people, this happens behind the scenes because of thier scores, others have to apply, and find someone to sponsor them. But, to get in on merit, there is one scholarship, and sponsorship, available per year from each ROTC school.
So, by excelling, I had an opportunity to go to a truly good school. Hence my enrollment in ROTC.
Now for the lucky part. I made a lifelong friend, joined the drill team, and learned, in a structured environment, how to deal with others in my age group. How to work in a team, and how to develop my leadership skills.
My friend, to whom I am eternally grateful, took me out, taught me to drink beer, smoke, a variety of other things, and challenged me in ways I hadn't been challenged.
Oh, I'd played baseball (badly, poor depth perception) and swim team (slowly, good stamina though, 400 meter medley), but those were challenges my brain could only help so much with.
No, conquering fear, that was the challenge game we were into. My friend took me to a set of cliffs, dropped a rope over the side, and taught me to rappel. He and another buddy taught me to ride a motorcycle. Then we got into motorcross. The variety of reckless dares taken based on the "No Balls" motivator was staggering in retrospect.
Now these were sports! Things I could do that took physical exertion, but required significant nerve and concentration. Chall
I realize that there are fairly stringent requirements for creating a proveably reverse engineered product, such as, say, an x86 compatible processor complete with MMX, etc. However, it has been done by more than one company....
So somebody please inform this reverse engineering layman, how exactly is a reverse engineered FAT filesystem layer any different from a reverse engineered processor? Why is FAT suddenly a candidate for licensing and patent infringement, if processors aren't?
First IANAL....
However, I have to service more than my fair share of DMCA Takedown requests...So I've actually read the text a few times.
I would think there are at least a few violations here:
1. Defeat of a "technological measure" to "control access" to a work protected under the DMCA, where the technological measure to control access consists of FTP and Web sites the world over to ensure it remains free?
2. Change of "Copyright Management Information". Would SCO's change in IP Licensing consitute a change in the copyright management information made without the consent of the actual copyright owner?
3. Whether the GPL itself is enforcable or not, would it seem the individual authors and copyright owners would still have cause for relief under the portions pertaining to the change in Copyright Management Information and "Terms and conditions for use of the work." ?
4. Couldn't this also satisfy the commercial advantage portion in the "Criminal offenses and penalties" Section? At $500,000 + 5 years imprisonment for the first offense, and $1,000,000 and 10 years for the second, couldn't SCO's exec's be in big trouble if any of my questions above are correct?
On the other hand, SCO seems to be selling for about $17/share, with 13.8M shares outstanding.
By my calculations, we'd need about 1,000,000 open source adherents to chip in $134 apeice, and we could stage our own hostile takeover...anyone know if this would be kosher with the SEC?
Speaking as a Pro-Linux Manager in a university environment, money talks....the trick here is to show savings that exceed the switching costs.
The hardest past is to put a price tag on "soft dollars". Some things need to be done to make it happen right.
Costs
1. CIS instructor retraining
Develop training and perform for 2,3,4 below
2. Faculty Retraining
Necessary to aid in 3,4 below
Will require new lesson plans or updates, screenshots, etc.
3. Staff Retraining
Trails 1 and 2 because it will take time to switch administrative systems.
4. Student Retraining
Happens by 2 above as part of normal classes
5. Alternative Package purchases
Recommendations:
1. There's some training out there already, including StarOffice training provided by Sun
2. Get IBM, Sun, and Oracle onboard to help plan, supply, and rollout. They will probably jump at the chance to move an entire university, as a model for other universities and businesses.
3. Sun has training (see #1 above) and trainers for staroffice that could do large on-site training.
4. IBM has trainers who can do large onsite training at a very nominal cost for large groups, get them to donate some and pay for the rest.
5. Oracle has training, administrative ERP packages aimed at university management, etc. as well as Linux training and Support.
6.Ask Alumn for time frame for switching....you're looking at a 2-3 year project for the administrative systems, unless you get IBM/Sun/Oracle to supply a small army of consultants, trainers, etc.
7. Try to put a number on "soft dollars" i.e. "Look how much time and personnel costs we can save by moving to reliable, managable servers and desktops..."
8. Discuss the future of IT and business, desktop, and home users. MS may be in use today, but that's chainging faster than most MS fans would like to admit. People are hiring Linux users NOW...
Also, contrary to popular MS fan beliefs...Linux users can run MS with a minimum of trouble...
The reverse is not as true.
First, a couple of assumptions...
1. She sleeps, therefore, motion sensors, retinal scanners, etc are out...REM sleep would set them off, and head attitude would make it very tricky to make it reliable.
2. She sleeps, therefore, working off hand movement, you would like it to be fairly descriminating...too many false alarms, too sensitive, etc, and you have "The little boy who cried wolf". a Few nights of being awakened 40 times and the hubby will be sleeping right through it.
So...
How about this as an idea to build upon...
Get a small cheap watch with an alarm, preferably load beeper and annoying. Take out the guts, saving the battery and speaker/buzzer/beeper.
Run two wires from a hole in the case to a finger. on the finger, velcro a mercury switch which you've attached the two leads to.
These two wires then attached to a couple of cheap IC's. The first, a counter and timer, set up such that it requires 3+ "movements" within 30 seconds to latch an output voltage.
The second IC works as a switch. Wire the output to the beeper (prolly will require a driver circuit to make it beep if it is only a simple speaker type). On the output as well, wire a feedback line to the input of your switch IC, through a normally closed momentary contact button mounted on the case (like in place of one of the buttons formerly occupied by the watch buttons). This way, once triggered by your movement, the beeper wil continue to sound after the timer/detector circuit resets, until such time as the hubby presses the momentary contact button to cut off your feedback line.
The IC's and etc could be picked up at radio shack, and the circuits I first built when I was about 9 or 10 in one of those learning electronics experiment kits RS used to sell.
If you're interested in this, drop me a line and we'll see what we can come up with for details.
There's prolly something better than a mercury switch for motion detection, but its late and I'm headed to bed.
Global Filesystem or some equivalent method for allowing simultaneous access by multiple systems to the same physical filesystems.
Improved traffic management facilities, preferably class based queuing, with some better user space tools for managing it(yes, I know the tools aren't really a part of the kernel)
ACL's ACL's ACL's!!!!!!
Shared memory architecture integrated with stock kernel for clustering. Would aid greatly in HA systems.
Quotas. Improved quotas that happen at the VFS layer, rather than in the actual fs layer would be dandy. Even better would be combining such a system with the Shared Memory architecture mentioned above thereby simplifying clustered solutions.
Hooks allowing online filesystem checks as much as possible.
I'm certain there are more, but those are the ones currently most needed in the enterprise area as I see it.
Essentially, our existing policy states that if the school requests an employee, faculty, staff, or grad assistant specifically writes a piece of code, literature, work product, etc. the school then owns it.
However, the school recognizes that students, grad assistants, faculty, and staff do a significant amount of personal research, writing, publication, etc. Unless the university has provided "substantial support" the author is the owner. "Substantial support" in this context specifically does not include use of computer equipment, office supplies, office space normally assigned, etc.
That said, there are those in the administration who are realizing that this stuff is worth money, and are trying to change this policy to be more in line with the corporate philosiphy that says "You're employed here, you created it, on your own time or not, we own it."
There are obviously, a number of us who are fighting this, albeit with a certain limited success ( translate - they nod and smile, then go back to writing up thier new policy).
Good Luck, I hope more people will take a stand for what should be thier own intellectual property, and maybe we can reverse this creeping corporatism trend.
I'm so ashamed for letting you "get my goat", but I'll lower my self and respond to this flame bait.
IE is not "clearly the better browser"
Not even close in fact.
You see, there are features other than bells and whistles that count.
Reliability
Adherence to standards
Functionality
Interoperability
Nope, sorry.....
Netscape in general does a better job than IE in all of the above categories.
If there are problems with Netscape 6....then by all means, lets get them fixed, since that *IS* after all, what a beta test is all about!
While these aren't the best solution, they are more fairly reliable, more so than floppies at least. We've had an initiative on campus to purchase all Lab and Classroom systems with internal zip drives. It has worked well. We provide students with space on our servers as well, about 10MB. This isn't enough for any significant number of large documents or powerpoint presentations. Zip disks have done an admirable job of solving this problem. It gives students a way to archive the files from thier network space once they are done with it, and gives them a place to store files larger than those allowed within the 10MB. I'd look at this one again if I were you. It's practical and works reasonably well.
I have gone through similar problems with major vendors as well. One major vendor actually required one of the techs to install NT over Linux to prove the HARDWARE problem wasn't linux, even though they claim (loudly) to support linux.
We evaluated 3 other vendors at that point.
Didn't see a single sales rep from any other vendor, even though we buy $150k+ of servers every year, and 300k+ of workstations.
Except IBM.
IBM showed up with a sales rep, and a support engineer to demo the units. Left 3 with us to test for 2 months!!!, and we called support whenever we needed. We didn't however, call any 1-800-go-away numbers...we had/have the phone and cell number of the support engineer for our area.
We decided on IBM.
the first order, they checked, found a couple of errors, and called with 3 questions on it.
They worked with our vendor (state contract) to get us the stuff in short order.
Now that we are buying from them, we have:
The telephone, fax, pager, email, cell phone, etc for both the sales rep, AND THE SUPPORT ENGINEER.
I haven't spoken to some generic so-and-so since we started buying from them.
I haven't ever had them complain about our distributions, or the things we are doing.
In fact, I've been overjoyed by thier support.
And the online pricing and server configuration stuff at thier website makes spec'ing servers for projects a breeze.
I strongly recommend you speak with them.
If anyone is particularly interested in speaking with our specific sales rep, drop me a line, and I'll send you her email and phone, etc.
I actually hit the wrong speed dial on Christmas Eve, and got the sales rep on her cell phone. She answered!!!!
Steven Walker
Network Systems Coordinator
Central Missouri State University
swalker@cmsu1.cmsu.edu
As usual, the opinions expressed are my own, and not necessarily those of my employer.
I work as a Network Administrator for a middlin sized university. I assure you that Linux is hardly the only OS/product with vendor support issues.
If you deal with any kind of large numbers of servers and workstations, network equipment, etc, you'll find the vendors really love to play the finger pointing game.
We've spent as long as 4 months of staff time doing packet captures to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that a vendor had problems with a certain backbone switch. After the product was discontinued, they released internal memos and technotes which revealed they had known about the problem internally for months prior to our experience with it. But it was cheaper for them to point fingers, than to replace the equipment with updated fixed models.
The only real defense against this is to cease buying from that vendor, and tell them the reason why. It isn't good enough to just tell the salesman....that will never get back to anyone in design or management. You'll have to send a message to customer service, or the managment, or both.
I can't of course name any names for fear of retribution...(not from the vendor, but from my superiors who are typically far more concerned about appearances, than the realities of what works and what deosn't.)
However, you'll find that a number of highly prominent vendors/manufacturers will play the same games, not just with Linux support, but with support of any kind.
Example:
A friend ordered a new laptop, with (ugh!) W2K and a DVD in March.
So far delivered and returned:
Win98 with a CD
Win 95 with a DVD
NT4.0 with a cd
NT 4.0 with a DVD
After that one he went off on the VP of Marketing for the company who told him that W2K was a free upgrade from NT4, just go to this web page and fill out form XXX.
Upon arrival at the web page, the offer for free upgrade had expired 30APR2000....well after the original shipment, but too late to help now.
He shipped it back on Monday....we'll see how long it takes to get it back.
In this case, the company really blew it. He had reasons for wanting that particular laptop...and so, is holding out for it.
Unfortunately for the aforementioned company, he's also responsible for ordering PC's for the company where he works....that companies contract was not renewed....and another is now selling him 500+ PC's per year.
Don't take the crap....just send it back, and tell them in no uncertain terms, this is not acceptable, and you're taking your business to company XXX instead.
Well, I'm a Network Systems Coordinator (Fancy title for Jack-Of-All-Trades/Highest Geek not in pure management) at CMSU in Warrensburg.
I read slashdot, freshmeat, and linux.com with a frequency that borders on religous fanaticism.
I work full time on Network Administration, System Administration of Linux clusters, and in-house development of various linux-based apps.
I've never heard of this thing.
We've got 4 other people who work directly for me on Linux development, a CS department who teaches on Linux workstations, a local LUG, numerous linux devotees, and lots more wannabees, I listen to a KC radio station daily, and during the day via the net, and not one said BOO about this thing.
I will concientously copy this to the organizer.
I have to say...had we known, I could be fairly certain of at least 2 fully paid attendees, and probably a number of others for 1-2 days, just from my department alone. At least three vendors who normally ask if I'm going to this or that expo/trade show/etc have spoken to me in the last few weeks, and nothing from them either.
This can not possibly have been publicized worth diddly. Sorry, hope you didn't lose your butt, but next year, better tell someone about it.
- Apple only company other than Windows with a viable consumer operating system.
WRONG - Symantics aside (viable is not the same thing as wildly successful) There are a number of othr operating systems currently available to consumers. Linux is but one example, the list goes on for quite some time.
- He [Jobs] thrills the crowd with demos of Aqua, QuickTime, and simplicity of FireWire and USB
WRONG - Sorry Charlie....you seem to have taken an overly simplistic view of the support situation here. Apple has always had drivers that worked for (...insert device type here...) because they stuck to only a VERY limited number of manufacturers. Once you hit the PC world, there are larger numbers of chipsets for Firewire, USB, etc to support. It's not gonna be an overnight, we support everything, kind of migration. Apple would be starting from ground zero and climbing back up writing device drivers just as Linux has done to support these large number of devices/manufacturers.
- Millions of Windows users tired of IRQ conflicts
WRONG again Charlie. The mere fact that Mac OS X is installed will neither resolve the conflicts, nor will it do away with the necessity of IRQ's on the Intel platforms. The reason Apple has not had such problems with conflicts is because of the limited number of slots, and limited number of add-on boards to fit those slots.
- The vast majority of computer users--even professionals--want nothing to do with a command line. Witness the earlier success of Windows NT
WRONG - once again, it would seem you have critically misunderstood the issue. Windows NT is/was not a success because the Networking/Server/PC professionals liked a GUI better. It was/is a success becuase MS has successfully marketed it to the Management in most organizations. They have sold them by touting it as the only way to ... and by telling them it has a lower TCO. Basically, they've implied that with the point-and-click interface, Management doesn't need to hire highly trained individuals, anyone should be able to handle the basics. On the other hand, even for those of us who originally liked NT3.51/4 most professionals I know spend most of their time back at the command line. Who wants to point-and-click thier way through updating 5000 accounts? In short, the GUI sold things to management, not the people who actually do the vast majority of the work.
-Linux has little to offer that Unix hasn't offered for years
WRONG - Boy, the hits just keep on comin... Sadly mistaken/misinformed once again. Linux offers something that Unix has not offered since the very early days of development. It offers the best and brightest minds with a combined experience of centuries (maybe even millenia) all working together for no other primary purpose than to build the best, most advanced and technically superior operating system ever known to mankind. Its the opportunity for the best and brightest to bring in what they want to see, thier new ideas, and old conecpts implemented right, to an OS that will accept thier developement efforts, and laud them (not the companies, the programmers!) for thier efforts. In short, it has rapidly risen to a level of excellence in every aspect that was hard to envision in it's early years.
IMHO - It couldn't happen.