... right now. Boot and autodiscovery of hardware was very nice, and finely polished, BUT a few things that the Knoppix v3.4-2004-05-04 iso that I downloaded and played with last night, beats SuSE 9.1 LiveCD. Knoppix found my Logitech MX-500 optical wheel mouse and activated the wheel in all apps that can use one automatically. It just worked, and the wheel was there in the first web browser I ran. Knoppix also automatically detected and setup my integrated mobo AC-97 soundcard and sound was there right away ready for me when I played the demo song in the audio player app. SuSE 9.1 detected my mouse as a plain USB mouse and I cannot get the wheel to work. I also had to manually configure my soundcard with YaST, and haven't found any demo tunes included to check out the music player:-/. SuSE is much prettier to look at... lots of glassy shiney eye candy which does beat Knoppix in the first-impression looks department. YaST was easier for me to use to set up my network card too, than Knoppix's tool... probably because I'm already familiar with YaST and I had to go prowling around Knoppix's menus and buttons to hunt for where to config the nic, it wasn't brain-dead obvious to someone who's never seen Knoppix before. Another plus for Knoppix is that Mozilla was already right there on the desktop ready to use.
I'm a die-hard SuSE fan and will probably buy the 9.1 box set, since I've not paid for a box set since 8.0, and freeloaded 8.1, 8.2 and 9.0, but I have to admit that for a ready-to-run and truly useable "live cdrom" version, I think Knoppix is the winner in the useability contest for these two CD-run distros. Armed with a USB memory stick, and a Knoppix 3.4 CDROM, and just about any pile of hardware with an Internet connection and you're good to go! The SuSE 9.1 Live CD, however is a great "wow-em" showcase for SuSE's product, but is not as ready for quick-n-dirty real live workstation productive use on a harddrive-less pile of hardware like Knoppix is.
These are just my humble opinions here, after spending only about an hour fooling around on each one of these run-from-cd distros, having never played with either before, and rather well-versed in Linux in general and especially SuSE.
If you're going to run any of these kinds of distributed clients, then you should run Folding@Home instead. The fruits of this work might just help save yours or a loved one's life someday.
I've never meet a hiring manager that doesn't move former military guys to the very top of the resume pile
I'm a network admin, and one step below the guy who does the actual hiring at my job. The last three tech support positions that we filled with ex-military applicants, because we once felt the same way about them, all turned out to be duds, and all three were just alike in personality and professional demeanor. In the interview, they all seemed very competant, yet humble and eager to learn and play on the team, but once aboard, all three had one and only one goal in mind: to see how fast they could push their way to the top and see if they take over mine and my boss's jobs. Rules and procedures be damned... those were just a hindrance to their goals. We had a constant mess just cleaning up all the unauthorized, unlicensed software they kept installing all about the organization and fixing all the network shared filesystem ACLs that they'd open wide up to full access to everyone because they thought ACL management was too big a hassle. One of them would deliberately install more unlicensed software on the users machines after each time my boss busted him for doing it. They turned out to not be team players at all, except when they got together to conspire against our boss and undermine his authority. My boss is an ex-Marine, and he swore he'd never hire another ex-military tech again if that's the way Uncle Sam is making them these days. Our two best, most productive, sharpest, and easiest to keep-in-line techs hired since then are a couple of typical total geeks. One is a complete Microsoft fanatic, and the other is a totally rabid anti-MS Linux & BSD fanatic. Thet get along great at work, no sh!t.
This is another example of why the 700MHz band needs to be given to public safety. The lower the frequency, the better the signal can penetrate into buildings, thru dense vegetation, and into low-lying areas that RF at 800MHz and above have a more difficult time reaching. 700MHz and 800MHz aren't really that far apart in the spectrum such that the basic radio hardware and antennas will have to change much at all, so the units (especially handhelds) can still be kept small and lightweight with low power consumption, but the slightly longer wavelength is just enough to give a noticeable performance edge to the signal penetration over 800MHz.
Another plus to the 700MHz band is that now that there is a need for more mobile data bandwidth for public safety, the "channels" can be allocated... and the new hardware designed, with this in mind. The old 800MHz trunked radio systems only provided a serial data channel about 4800 baud, which is utterly worthless. If the new 700MHz frequency allocations are done right, they should be able to make the "channels" a bit wider, and facilitate a consistant 64K or better baud rate, which can support enough TCP/IP bandwidth to be useful for mobile data terminals in the vehicles without having to resort to the public safety entities spending huges amounts of money to the cellphone companies to lease their wireless data service like they have to do currently.
Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion, or OTEC would produce both electricity AND fresh water (from condensate). Building an OTEC plant big enough to be worthwhile would be an enourmous construction expense, though. Payback for return on investment would take forever, but there would be no pollution produced.
Annual inspections on my Piper Cherokee run from $500-1100 the past few years. Complete engine overhauls are at 2000 hours of operating time, or 12 years whichever comes first and cost and the last one on my aircraft was done in 1999 and cost about $12K. In the USA a personally-owned small aircraft that is not used for commercial purposes does not have to have the engine overhauled at the otherwise mandatory intervals as long as it's still running strong, not "making metal" into the oil, or consuming too much oil. The Lycoming O-320 like in my plane can often surpass 2500-3000 hours of runtime before it really must be overhauled if it is taken care of correctly during it's life. At about 100 hours a year of use, that's about a quarter century of flying!
The aircraft lost cabin pressure at very high altitude (40,000+ feet?) and all aboard died very quickly (seconds, maybe a minute) from hypoxia (lack of oxygen) loooong before the aircraft ran out of fuel and crashed. At such high altitudes, not even breathing 100% oxygen will keep you alive, unless you're in a pressurized cabin since the O2 will literally boil out of your blood .
Anyway, now you can't pick up a new single engine Cessna for less than 158K
And you can still pick up a decent used, older single-engine plane that has decades more life left in it for under $30K. A brand new GMC pickup truck costs more than I paid for my Piper Cherokee. Why people shell out over an eighth of a million dollars for a new C172, I don't understand. If I had ~$160K to spend on an airplane, I'd much rather buy an older, bigger, plane like a T210 or perhaps even a Skymaster 337 inline twin in that price range.
I prefer not to have my freshly laundered clothes covered with freshly shat bird droppings. You *do* have birds in Oz, don't you mate? Contrary to popular myth, we (still) have an abundance of them here in the US.
How do you miss something like this when there's a careful set of instructions to follow for every step of the assembly? I don't know, but I do know that humans are fallible, so we are constantly dealing with a stream of lost, damaged, and defective parts.
Independent software packages would be once again able to compete in the marketplace again, like in the olden days. It would be good for the software industry as a whole is MS is forced to sell a plain OS and be prohibited from giving the apps away for free since they are a convicted monopolist and giving away free apps would make them predatory in the marketplace.
Well, that does sound a bit absurd, but I sure betcha the copy of the site in the Wayback machine will probably surpass that in this one single day thanks to ericspinder's helpful little url link in the parent:-)
Slashdot Mirror
... right now. Boot and autodiscovery of hardware was very nice, and finely polished, BUT a few things that the Knoppix v3.4-2004-05-04 iso that I downloaded and played with last night, beats SuSE 9.1 LiveCD. Knoppix found my Logitech MX-500 optical wheel mouse and activated the wheel in all apps that can use one automatically. It just worked, and the wheel was there in the first web browser I ran. Knoppix also automatically detected and setup my integrated mobo AC-97 soundcard and sound was there right away ready for me when I played the demo song in the audio player app. SuSE 9.1 detected my mouse as a plain USB mouse and I cannot get the wheel to work. I also had to manually configure my soundcard with YaST, and haven't found any demo tunes included to check out the music player :-/. SuSE is much prettier to look at... lots of glassy shiney eye candy which does beat Knoppix in the first-impression looks department. YaST was easier for me to use to set up my network card too, than Knoppix's tool... probably because I'm already familiar with YaST and I had to go prowling around Knoppix's menus and buttons to hunt for where to config the nic, it wasn't brain-dead obvious to someone who's never seen Knoppix before. Another plus for Knoppix is that Mozilla was already right there on the desktop ready to use.
I'm a die-hard SuSE fan and will probably buy the 9.1 box set, since I've not paid for a box set since 8.0, and freeloaded 8.1, 8.2 and 9.0, but I have to admit that for a ready-to-run and truly useable "live cdrom" version, I think Knoppix is the winner in the useability contest for these two CD-run distros. Armed with a USB memory stick, and a Knoppix 3.4 CDROM, and just about any pile of hardware with an Internet connection and you're good to go! The SuSE 9.1 Live CD, however is a great "wow-em" showcase for SuSE's product, but is not as ready for quick-n-dirty real live workstation productive use on a harddrive-less pile of hardware like Knoppix is.
These are just my humble opinions here, after spending only about an hour fooling around on each one of these run-from-cd distros, having never played with either before, and rather well-versed in Linux in general and especially SuSE.
I suppose the next steps would be:
:-)
6. Realize that your product is deader than a doornail
7. Sue the hell out of every major player in the industry
8. PROFIT???
Now where have we heard that before
Linus, Darl, It is time to pick up your swords and swing.
If the world of computer technology is "the stone", then Linus has already cleaved it with a sword made of software.
If you're going to run any of these kinds of distributed clients, then you should run Folding@Home instead. The fruits of this work might just help save yours or a loved one's life someday.
I've never meet a hiring manager that doesn't move former military guys to the very top of the resume pile
I'm a network admin, and one step below the guy who does the actual hiring at my job. The last three tech support positions that we filled with ex-military applicants, because we once felt the same way about them, all turned out to be duds, and all three were just alike in personality and professional demeanor. In the interview, they all seemed very competant, yet humble and eager to learn and play on the team, but once aboard, all three had one and only one goal in mind: to see how fast they could push their way to the top and see if they take over mine and my boss's jobs. Rules and procedures be damned... those were just a hindrance to their goals. We had a constant mess just cleaning up all the unauthorized, unlicensed software they kept installing all about the organization and fixing all the network shared filesystem ACLs that they'd open wide up to full access to everyone because they thought ACL management was too big a hassle. One of them would deliberately install more unlicensed software on the users machines after each time my boss busted him for doing it. They turned out to not be team players at all, except when they got together to conspire against our boss and undermine his authority. My boss is an ex-Marine, and he swore he'd never hire another ex-military tech again if that's the way Uncle Sam is making them these days. Our two best, most productive, sharpest, and easiest to keep-in-line techs hired since then are a couple of typical total geeks. One is a complete Microsoft fanatic, and the other is a totally rabid anti-MS Linux & BSD fanatic. Thet get along great at work, no sh!t.
This is another example of why the 700MHz band needs to be given to public safety. The lower the frequency, the better the signal can penetrate into buildings, thru dense vegetation, and into low-lying areas that RF at 800MHz and above have a more difficult time reaching. 700MHz and 800MHz aren't really that far apart in the spectrum such that the basic radio hardware and antennas will have to change much at all, so the units (especially handhelds) can still be kept small and lightweight with low power consumption, but the slightly longer wavelength is just enough to give a noticeable performance edge to the signal penetration over 800MHz.
Another plus to the 700MHz band is that now that there is a need for more mobile data bandwidth for public safety, the "channels" can be allocated... and the new hardware designed, with this in mind. The old 800MHz trunked radio systems only provided a serial data channel about 4800 baud, which is utterly worthless. If the new 700MHz frequency allocations are done right, they should be able to make the "channels" a bit wider, and facilitate a consistant 64K or better baud rate, which can support enough TCP/IP bandwidth to be useful for mobile data terminals in the vehicles without having to resort to the public safety entities spending huges amounts of money to the cellphone companies to lease their wireless data service like they have to do currently.
Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion, or OTEC would produce both electricity AND fresh water (from condensate). Building an OTEC plant big enough to be worthwhile would be an enourmous construction expense, though. Payback for return on investment would take forever, but there would be no pollution produced.
Annual inspections on my Piper Cherokee run from $500-1100 the past few years. Complete engine overhauls are at 2000 hours of operating time, or 12 years whichever comes first and cost and the last one on my aircraft was done in 1999 and cost about $12K. In the USA a personally-owned small aircraft that is not used for commercial purposes does not have to have the engine overhauled at the otherwise mandatory intervals as long as it's still running strong, not "making metal" into the oil, or consuming too much oil. The Lycoming O-320 like in my plane can often surpass 2500-3000 hours of runtime before it really must be overhauled if it is taken care of correctly during it's life. At about 100 hours a year of use, that's about a quarter century of flying!
NTSB report here
The aircraft lost cabin pressure at very high altitude (40,000+ feet?) and all aboard died very quickly (seconds, maybe a minute) from hypoxia (lack of oxygen) loooong before the aircraft ran out of fuel and crashed. At such high altitudes, not even breathing 100% oxygen will keep you alive, unless you're in a pressurized cabin since the O2 will literally boil out of your blood .
Anyway, now you can't pick up a new single engine Cessna for less than 158K
And you can still pick up a decent used, older single-engine plane that has decades more life left in it for under $30K. A brand new GMC pickup truck costs more than I paid for my Piper Cherokee. Why people shell out over an eighth of a million dollars for a new C172, I don't understand. If I had ~$160K to spend on an airplane, I'd much rather buy an older, bigger, plane like a T210 or perhaps even a Skymaster 337 inline twin in that price range.
L i n d o v v s
You deserve getting a year's worth of unlimited free mod points for digging up that link in this context.
I prefer not to have my freshly laundered clothes covered with freshly shat bird droppings. You *do* have birds in Oz, don't you mate? Contrary to popular myth, we (still) have an abundance of them here in the US.
good work scientists :)
ENGINEERS had more to do with getting this ship up to Mach 7 that did the scientists!
How do you miss something like this when there's a careful set of instructions to follow for every step of the assembly? I don't know, but I do know that humans are fallible, so we are constantly dealing with a stream of lost, damaged, and defective parts.
...not reading and/or obeying the instructions.
Unfortunately the Wayback Machine doens't have any of the pictures archived.... only has the text :-/
I'm happy to see the site finally get the news for nerds treatment it deserves
:-)
Yeah! That's even got a catchy ring to it... From now on, when we want to bring a site to its knees, we'll give it the news for nerds treatment.
...then your choice is already made: Gentoo.
:-)
Next best thing to FreeBSD
(ducking)
Independent software packages would be once again able to compete in the marketplace again, like in the olden days. It would be good for the software industry as a whole is MS is forced to sell a plain OS and be prohibited from giving the apps away for free since they are a convicted monopolist and giving away free apps would make them predatory in the marketplace.
I can't help but wonder how much money it costs to keep and maintain these structures in habitable condition.
...I can hardly wait until the BFC-9000 cpu chip is released.
Well, that does sound a bit absurd, but I sure betcha the copy of the site in the Wayback machine will probably surpass that in this one single day thanks to ericspinder's helpful little url link in the parent :-)
XP Forever, and it'll be released "when it's done".
... they weren't actually designed by some dude named Dean Utley who runs an outfit called "SJR DataSystems" :-)