We don't need no steenking moving parts
on
OpenBSD 3.5 Released
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Build your OBSD firewall in a Soekris box. Low power, low noise, runs from a CF card (or boots via PXE). Some models accept power-over-ethernet. And Soekris directly supports FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and Linux.
So IBM is selling a version of Linux that will run under zVM, its mainframe virtualization technology, as well as hardware modules that are basically PowerPC G5 units you can add to the base hardware for the explicit purpose of running Linux
IBM does not sell any Linux distribution. They provide documentation for running one of your choice (i.e. SuSE or RHEL) and offers support for a fee.
The S/390 port of Linux will run natively in a zSeries logical partition (or LPAR -- a builtin virtual machine facility). You can define between 15-30 LPARs in your complex, regardless of the number of physical processors that are present. I run twin z/OS images and one SuSE Linux server on my single-processor system, without the benefit of z/VM.
There is no "PowerPC G5 unit", though you may be referring to a so-called "IFL" processor. This is a CPU that is only licensed to run z/VM or Linux. Since z/OS is charged on a per-CPU basis, you can save on software costs if you purchase additional IFLs instead of full-function processors. (This is only a licensing trick; both types of processor still run S/390 code.)
the contractors installed conduits as I requested but didn't put in pull-wires
Use a "mouse" -- a little piece of foam with a pull string attached. Force it to the other end with a shop vac. Ought to be easy unless you have some wicked elbows in the conduit, in which case you don't want to run anything high speed in it anyway.
Sure. Obstetricians pay a near obscene amount, somewhere close to 100 grand a year in premiums, depending on whether premiums are capped in their particular state.
But the physicians don't pay these premiums, we do, in the form of ridiculous insurance payments of our own. Most of us end up overpaying for medical care while people who file nuisance lawsuits make easy money.
a xerox authorized rep [...] said that the damage was probably caused by our use of third party wax ink cartridges
Yeah, I had a Xerox FE pull that stunt on me. Our large (big photocopier size) laser printer had been jamming pages, and when he came in he sort of sniffed and without even looking at the machine declared that it was likely a problem with the paper we were using.
I said "Follow me", and led him to a storage area off the computer room, filled with pallets of Xerox-branded copy paper. Pointing out the recording hygrometer on the shelf, I asked him to verify that the specific humidity and temperature I had in that room was correct for his paper. Then I suggested that if he had a problem with his paper, then he should take it up with his forms rep.
The FE pursed his lips and didn't say a word. He turned around and went to work on his printer, and an hour later it was purring like a kitten.
We dumped the Xerox printers at the end of the lease cycle. Great equipment, lousy attitude at the field service end.
IBM's founder spent time in prison for his string arm dealings in the cash register business
Thirty NCR executives were found guilty in that decision, which was subsequently overturned. See
this Fortune article for an overview. As far as I can tell, T.J. Watson never served a day.
Oh, and while T.J. arguably founded the modern IBM, the company had existed for years before T.J. got there as the "Computer Tabulating Recording Company". CTR was itself a derivative of Herman Hollerith's Tabulating Machine Company, founded in 1896.
I sort of doubt anyone wants to risk their lives repairing generic communications satillite #5 so soccer moms can continue to yak on their cell phones
If you put out a help-wanted ad for a comsat repair guy today, you'd have a thousand applicants by noon. There are people who would give everything for the privilege of taking a one way trip to Mars. Just because you wouldn't risk eating space fixing a satellite doesn't mean that others wouldn't.
The world is full of people that do risky things for a living: stock car drivers, miners, steeplejacks, soldiers... the list is endless.
There's a line from _The Godfather_ that I like. One of the characters was a mafia enforcer, a demonic, barely contained, fearsome hulk of a man. Don Corleone observed that once in a while you run into a man who is hell-bent to die. Paraphrased: "Such a man can help you. And you can help him."
Years ago (okay, 30 damn years) as a wet-behind-the-ears systems programmer wannabe, I ran out of usable space when adding a program to a system library. Fine, I said, I'll just "compress" the library (IBM object libraries of the time used to contain holes where programs had previously been deleted; it was necessary to intermittently defragment these libraries).
Unfortunately, the library I defragmented was SYS1.LINKLIB -- out of which most of the operating system was executed as well as the defragment utility itself. Very quickly after the utility started moving programs around on the disk the operating system ground to a halt.
The real systems programmer, who had been up all night, was NOT amused. He had to come in and I helped him perform a DR. The mainframe system was down all day -- I wasn't very popular.
Somehow I didn't lose my job. In fact, I eventually came to own technical support and operations there. But 10+ years after my screwup people still liked to remind me about it. Guess they figured it kept me humble.
There are some interesting photos and information on Tom Droege's TASS site. Not sure how active they are at the moment, but there are some knowledgeable people there.
I'm not terribly familiar with TiVo, but I'm aware that they have the ability to report your viewing habits.
Don't like having the DVR and digital cable guys in my knickers, so... is this a good reason for going through the MythTV hassle?
I remember from my youth a National Lampoon article entitled "How to Swear in Esperanto". It contained an assortment of curses ("May your penis be struck by lightning") and handy phrases ("Pardon me, could you direct me to the nearest medical facility? My penis has just been struck by lightning").
Alas, the article is lost to antiquity. But a Google search produces this useful vocabulary list.
... one of the Bell Labs' UNIX gods (I forget which) demonstrated how a C compiler could (a) insert backdoor binary code into applications it was compiling and (b) recognize when it was compiling itself and insert the backdoor-inserting code
Just a big storm, ocean churning up a little bit. (But I'm kinda hoping that lots of you check it out anyway, and give Mac's DSL connection some exercise.)
They reserve the right to disclose this, plus identifying information, to third parties.
They explicitly declare that in the event of their bankruptcy they can sell this information, or give it to the company they merge with.
They share your personal information with magazine "partners", whose use of your personal information is beyond their control.
Magazine subscription departments are scum. I was purely amazed at the crap my basset received in the mail after I subscribed her to Spy magazine.
Can't be tracked buying at the newsstand, and paying cash! Would you buy a subscription to 2600 through these guys?
Thanks ORA: a primer series w/o an insulting title
on
Head First Java
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· Score: 1
I'll gladly spend money on a "Head First..." or "... for Novices" series. But it'll be a cold day in Hell before I buy anything designated for Dummies or Idiots.
Kudos to O'Reilly for titling their primers with some dignity.
Linux.conf.au (2003) proceedings .iso
on
Knowledge by Ear?
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· Score: 3, Informative
... includes audio recordings in Ogg/Speex format. See here.
Agreed. I bought a used Compaq Armada with a cracked case and a battery that was NFG. Plugged it into an UPS, slapped OpenBSD on it and configured PF. Makes a dandy firewall and PPPoE box for my DSL connection, is low-power and silent.
Another poster warned about HD reliability, though. We'll see what happens.
Uploading at full speed throttles my whole connection
I use an OpenBSD 3.3 box as my DSL firewall. The new version of pf integrates ALTQ, meaning that you can assign packet traffic to queues based on their ToS priorities. See this writeup for details.
Before I upgraded to 3.3, Internet response was abysmal whenever I was running a concurrent BitTorrent uploader. Now it is much more bearable. (If only I could get PPPoE to stay up for more than 20 minutes at a time...)
John advertises his business and responds to queries over at K5. $65/mo for a FreeBSD jail, $75/mo for a Linux virtual machine running under (I think) VMWare. He gives discounts to free software developers.
1. Record the birth, *tastefully*. Don't take graphic photos that you'd only show to a few intimate family members. Take pictures that you wouldn't mind publishing in your daughter's high school yearbook in her senior year. Stills are far more valuable than video. Think about whom you want to take these photos; I did it myself because I didn't want anybody but my wife and me and the necessary medical people there, but I had to divide my time between being a videographer and being a supportive husband. I don't know that I made the right decision; if you have a *close* friend or family member, it might be worth putting him/her to work.
2. Names: naming our daughters was one of the hardest things I've ever done, an exercise in diplomacy and accommodation. My wife and I came up with independent lists of names, ranked in order of preference, then we compared lists to see where we agreed, and negotiated from there. This may work for you, it may not. The important thing is: KEEP THOSE LISTS. Remember the names that you considered; my girls have both been intensely interested in where their names came from and what other names were candidates.
3. Introduce the family dog to the newborn with especial loving emphasis on the dog. Our basset (Ada, after the Lady Augusta Lovelace) was introduced to my firstborn with lots of praise and pats. Whenever Ada and my daughter were in the same room we put them together and told Ada what a good girl she was. Forever after that Ada the basset spent her nights guarding my daughter's crib; that was *her* baby. Don't let the pets get an opportunity to become jealous of the interloper!
4. Colic: others have already commented about this. This can be bad juju, your baby is terribly unhappy for no obvious reason. My firstborn's pediatrician prescribed Levsine, an anticholinergic drug which worked absolute wonders for us. A couple of drops by mouth made all the difference. But my second daughter's pediatrician steadfastly refused to prescribe same, saying it was dangerous. You'll find references on the 'net that say that doctors these days are hesitant to prescribe Levsine except in the most acute cases, but I'm here to tell you that it was good stuff for *us*. Your mileage and circumstances may vary of course, but you should know that there are options. Colic is no fun for anybody.
5. Get a Blockbuster card. Your days of spontaneously going out for a movie are over for the short term. Even after you're able to take the wee ones to a theater, you won't see anything but Disney features. I missed movies more than anything while my kids were growing up.
6. Introduce your child to your computers EARLY. Small children don't have much in the way of eye-hand coordination, and they aren't able to handwrite individual characters. But they CAN certainly recognize them, and it doesn't take much eye-hand coordination to use a keyboard. When my daughter was less than two and unable to write her name, she was able to boot up our MS-DOS machine and type her name, executing a BAT file that played Christmas carols. My four-year-old niece installed a program on her family's MS-Windows computer when her Papa didn't have time for her -- she'd seen Papa do it before: Next... Next... Next... Next... Finish! Handwriting skills != literacy.
7. Every child in Florida should know how to swim, it's a basic and even survival skill. I don't know how necessary it is where you live, but resist the temptation to teach them too early. My firstborn was taught to swim just before she turned two, and it worked well. We yielded to the advice of others and took our second in to the Infant Swim Research people when she was just over six months old. Big mistake IMO; babies can't be "drown proofed", and at best you can get a six-month old to flip over on her back and float for a few minutes. They don't learn much, there is too much trauma involved for the child, and a six month old shouldn't be out of your sight for more than a few seconds at a time anyway u
Slashdot Mirror
Build your OBSD firewall in a Soekris box. Low power, low noise, runs from a CF card (or boots via PXE). Some models accept power-over-ethernet. And Soekris directly supports FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and Linux.
The S/390 port of Linux will run natively in a zSeries logical partition (or LPAR -- a builtin virtual machine facility). You can define between 15-30 LPARs in your complex, regardless of the number of physical processors that are present. I run twin z/OS images and one SuSE Linux server on my single-processor system, without the benefit of z/VM.
There is no "PowerPC G5 unit", though you may be referring to a so-called "IFL" processor. This is a CPU that is only licensed to run z/VM or Linux. Since z/OS is charged on a per-CPU basis, you can save on software costs if you purchase additional IFLs instead of full-function processors. (This is only a licensing trick; both types of processor still run S/390 code.)
Use a "mouse" -- a little piece of foam with a pull string attached. Force it to the other end with a shop vac. Ought to be easy unless you have some wicked elbows in the conduit, in which case you don't want to run anything high speed in it anyway.
Sure. Obstetricians pay a near obscene amount, somewhere close to 100 grand a year in premiums, depending on whether premiums are capped in their particular state.
But the physicians don't pay these premiums, we do, in the form of ridiculous insurance payments of our own. Most of us end up overpaying for medical care while people who file nuisance lawsuits make easy money.
So if you don't sue, are you a chump?
Yeah, I had a Xerox FE pull that stunt on me. Our large (big photocopier size) laser printer had been jamming pages, and when he came in he sort of sniffed and without even looking at the machine declared that it was likely a problem with the paper we were using.
I said "Follow me", and led him to a storage area off the computer room, filled with pallets of Xerox-branded copy paper. Pointing out the recording hygrometer on the shelf, I asked him to verify that the specific humidity and temperature I had in that room was correct for his paper. Then I suggested that if he had a problem with his paper, then he should take it up with his forms rep.
The FE pursed his lips and didn't say a word. He turned around and went to work on his printer, and an hour later it was purring like a kitten.
We dumped the Xerox printers at the end of the lease cycle. Great equipment, lousy attitude at the field service end.
Thirty NCR executives were found guilty in that decision, which was subsequently overturned. See this Fortune article for an overview. As far as I can tell, T.J. Watson never served a day.
Oh, and while T.J. arguably founded the modern IBM, the company had existed for years before T.J. got there as the "Computer Tabulating Recording Company". CTR was itself a derivative of Herman Hollerith's Tabulating Machine Company, founded in 1896.
Somebody should tell Darl about Google.
The world is full of people that do risky things for a living: stock car drivers, miners, steeplejacks, soldiers... the list is endless.
There's a line from _The Godfather_ that I like. One of the characters was a mafia enforcer, a demonic, barely contained, fearsome hulk of a man. Don Corleone observed that once in a while you run into a man who is hell-bent to die. Paraphrased: "Such a man can help you. And you can help him."
Unfortunately, the library I defragmented was SYS1.LINKLIB -- out of which most of the operating system was executed as well as the defragment utility itself. Very quickly after the utility started moving programs around on the disk the operating system ground to a halt.
The real systems programmer, who had been up all night, was NOT amused. He had to come in and I helped him perform a DR. The mainframe system was down all day -- I wasn't very popular.
Somehow I didn't lose my job. In fact, I eventually came to own technical support and operations there. But 10+ years after my screwup people still liked to remind me about it. Guess they figured it kept me humble.
There are some interesting photos and information on Tom Droege's TASS site. Not sure how active they are at the moment, but there are some knowledgeable people there.
Check out Bob Young's (yes, that Bob Young's) Lulu service. No setup fees.
I'm not terribly familiar with TiVo, but I'm aware that they have the ability to report your viewing habits.
Don't like having the DVR and digital cable guys in my knickers, so... is this a good reason for going through the MythTV hassle?
Yesterday somebody at K5 posted a short article listing sites with downloadable music, including Magnatune (which somebody else mentioned).
Alas, the article is lost to antiquity. But a Google search produces this useful vocabulary list.
You are referring to Ken Thompson's Turing Award Lecture.
Just a big storm, ocean churning up a little bit. (But I'm kinda hoping that lots of you check it out anyway, and give Mac's DSL connection some exercise.)
Oh, and the Marist linux-390 listserver is well worth subscribing to.
Magazine subscription departments are scum. I was purely amazed at the crap my basset received in the mail after I subscribed her to Spy magazine.
Can't be tracked buying at the newsstand, and paying cash! Would you buy a subscription to 2600 through these guys?
I'll gladly spend money on a "Head First..." or "... for Novices" series. But it'll be a cold day in Hell before I buy anything designated for Dummies or Idiots.
Kudos to O'Reilly for titling their primers with some dignity.
... includes audio recordings in Ogg/Speex format. See here.
Agreed. I bought a used Compaq Armada with a cracked case and a battery that was NFG. Plugged it into an UPS, slapped OpenBSD on it and configured PF. Makes a dandy firewall and PPPoE box for my DSL connection, is low-power and silent.
Another poster warned about HD reliability, though. We'll see what happens.
Uploading at full speed throttles my whole connection
I use an OpenBSD 3.3 box as my DSL firewall. The new version of pf integrates ALTQ, meaning that you can assign packet traffic to queues based on their ToS priorities. See this writeup for details.
Before I upgraded to 3.3, Internet response was abysmal whenever I was running a concurrent BitTorrent uploader. Now it is much more bearable. (If only I could get PPPoE to stay up for more than 20 minutes at a time...)
John advertises his business and responds to queries over at K5. $65/mo for a FreeBSD jail, $75/mo for a Linux virtual machine running under (I think) VMWare. He gives discounts to free software developers.
There are lots of positive testimonials .
2. Names: naming our daughters was one of the hardest things I've ever done, an exercise in diplomacy and accommodation. My wife and I came up with independent lists of names, ranked in order of preference, then we compared lists to see where we agreed, and negotiated from there. This may work for you, it may not. The important thing is: KEEP THOSE LISTS. Remember the names that you considered; my girls have both been intensely interested in where their names came from and what other names were candidates.
3. Introduce the family dog to the newborn with especial loving emphasis on the dog. Our basset (Ada, after the Lady Augusta Lovelace) was introduced to my firstborn with lots of praise and pats. Whenever Ada and my daughter were in the same room we put them together and told Ada what a good girl she was. Forever after that Ada the basset spent her nights guarding my daughter's crib; that was *her* baby. Don't let the pets get an opportunity to become jealous of the interloper!
4. Colic: others have already commented about this. This can be bad juju, your baby is terribly unhappy for no obvious reason. My firstborn's pediatrician prescribed Levsine, an anticholinergic drug which worked absolute wonders for us. A couple of drops by mouth made all the difference. But my second daughter's pediatrician steadfastly refused to prescribe same, saying it was dangerous. You'll find references on the 'net that say that doctors these days are hesitant to prescribe Levsine except in the most acute cases, but I'm here to tell you that it was good stuff for *us*. Your mileage and circumstances may vary of course, but you should know that there are options. Colic is no fun for anybody.
5. Get a Blockbuster card. Your days of spontaneously going out for a movie are over for the short term. Even after you're able to take the wee ones to a theater, you won't see anything but Disney features. I missed movies more than anything while my kids were growing up.
6. Introduce your child to your computers EARLY. Small children don't have much in the way of eye-hand coordination, and they aren't able to handwrite individual characters. But they CAN certainly recognize them, and it doesn't take much eye-hand coordination to use a keyboard. When my daughter was less than two and unable to write her name, she was able to boot up our MS-DOS machine and type her name, executing a BAT file that played Christmas carols. My four-year-old niece installed a program on her family's MS-Windows computer when her Papa didn't have time for her -- she'd seen Papa do it before: Next... Next... Next... Next... Finish! Handwriting skills != literacy.
7. Every child in Florida should know how to swim, it's a basic and even survival skill. I don't know how necessary it is where you live, but resist the temptation to teach them too early. My firstborn was taught to swim just before she turned two, and it worked well. We yielded to the advice of others and took our second in to the Infant Swim Research people when she was just over six months old. Big mistake IMO; babies can't be "drown proofed", and at best you can get a six-month old to flip over on her back and float for a few minutes. They don't learn much, there is too much trauma involved for the child, and a six month old shouldn't be out of your sight for more than a few seconds at a time anyway u