Netstations have long been able to boot off Linux as a server. No software was provided to configure the Netstations from Linux, but this can be done in a Windows machine, then put in the Linux server for the Netstations to use it. In fact, using Linux as a server, I am booting 10 concurrent machines with no problems... And from the original 150MB root directory provided by IBM, I have skimmed it down to ~15MB - I only needed an X terminal, and that's just what it does now.
The operating system shipped with the NetStation is a weird, crippled, limited and client-oriented version of AIX.
I think this will be rather productive - Well, depends on your needs. For me, it's the greatest news since hot chocolate became widely available. We just bought ~100 IBM NetStations, to run an in-house developed program. The problem is, we had no way of running it on the machines - they were just X terminals. Damn good X terminals. But for every 10 machines, we needed a 192MB-RAM P-III server. Now (I hope), we will be able to use our old trusty 486 as a file server, and run the apps on the Netstation itself!
I just used a kitchen knife to kill someone. Is the knife manufacturer to be held responsible? Will we need that from now on all knifes will be made of plastic, to avoid injuries? I don't think so.
You give out an excellent tool for monitoring (say, SATAN). Someone will find an evil way to use it. In fact, almost every single piece of software can be held responsible for damages: Sendmail for sending spam, rm for removing files which were not supposed to be removed, Gnome for being the cracker's environment, Linux for being such an allowing operating system that allowed him to put malformed packets in the network... And it could go on and on...
There's a big difference between well-skilled IT professionals, like Miguel, and the average illegal immigrant. I am not supporting the drain of Mexicans into the US, that's harmful for both countries and - specially - for the people that actually cross the border. But Miguel, I think, has a very different case. Denying a visa to someone like him seems plainly stupid - without taking into account what you or I think about it. You prefer having him in Mexico, I also do... But he does not. And he is perfectly qualified to take the decision.
And for the record, his family lives in the USA. The only thing preventing him from living there was the lack of a visa, because he doesn't have a degree... Who needs a degree when having the knowledge?
Well... It started with a floppy, back then when few people used modems, and most modems were = 2400 bps. It doesn't work anymore - too small. Great, now we have CDs. But... Don't you think that with xDSL installed at home you will also find CDs useless?
Depends on the magazine and on the ads. Sometimes (remember Computer Shopper) the ads are worth more than the content itself. Sometimes, ads are very welcome.
On UNIX and networking magazines, which are the only ones I buy, I like browsing through the magazine, looking more at the ads than at the content, before actually reading the magazine, so I can grasp the one or two interesting ones, and ignore the rest of them. It's not that hard to do, because most full-page ads are on the same side of the magazine, and I usually fold it along the center when I read it:)
Of course, I would love to remove ads from general public magazines... Except by the fact that I'm not interested in them, and I never read them:)
The only problem is that it is really hard to read a web-page on your way to work, on a plane, while in the bathroom, when someone is using your computer, in your bed... Paper is still very useful.
I think printed computer magazines still have a long way to live... But there will not be as many as there are now. The ones that can be easily and relatively painlessly merged or converted to portals will do so. We will, however, stay with a couple dozens of computer magazines of varying technical levels.
They keep saying that the US is the land of the free - An I understand from that that they want everybody to be as free as they are. Also, they keep saying they are commited to having the best IT people working with them.
And then, I see this. Miguel, a brilliant and very recognized and skilled programmer, has been trying to move to the US for several years already. I would never dream of doing so, but anyway - It's not me. I'd prefer having him stay in Mexico (in UNAM, in fact)... He wants to leave, so be it...
The US government is, I think, among the blindest entities ever to exist. What more accreditation do you need than to see this guy's work? Unbelievable...
I would say that, according to your logic, Win2000 will be the smallest operating system on earth - None of the lines of code bring the system into an operational state:)
In Mexico, I have seen IT salaries ranging from about $3,000 to $30,000 a year (extremely under- and over-paid - it would be more real to say it goes from $7,000 to $15,000, it's much more usual).
However, that doesn't mean we are underpaid; the cost of living in Mexico is WAY under what you would expect... I have a relatively expensive way of living, and I spend about 15 dollars a day. It is not hard to live (and pretty decently) with about 5 dollars a day. In fact, the minimum wages go at US$2.2 per day - and many people live with less than that.
802.11 is very secure - Secure according even to military standards. I don't have the exact data handy, but there are basically two variants: - Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum - Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum
The good one, accodring to most experts, is FHSS. Your two points of communication agree on a common, long key, and they transmit data shifting their band according to the key. It's nearly impossible to interfere, even harder to decode, and very resistent to frequency jamming.
I suggest you to take a look at Breezecom, they have very good equipment for 802.11 (we use it here in Mexico, no problems whatsoever, very easy to set up, and much more reliable than a wire-based network)
3D mouse - Same thing as what we have now...
on
3D Window Manager
·
· Score: 1
A lot of the mouses (most of them) that you can find in a store have already a little wheel or up-down key, useful for scrolling inside a window... Well, how would you like having a mouse that displays thin rays to the X, Y and Z axes (in order to help you locate your reality in a 2D monitor). The wheel would move you front/back, and the mouse would be up/down/left/right. OK, maybe not 100% a 3D input device - But at least much more confortable than holding up your hand in a glove 8 hours a day!
I have been setting up some thin clients based on our old (8MB, no hard disk) 486s. I boot off a floppy based on a modified LODS, which in turn is a modified Hal91 distribution. The machines are too small to boot X (thus, I can't use muLinux - it needs at least 16MB to boot X). VNC is ideal for me, I can have one big server with 10 running copies of the application I provide to the clients, which are completely stateless - you just boot the client and it appears exactly where you left it. On a LAN, display speed is perfectly comparable to X, and it can also be deployed (albeit VERY slowly) over a modem.
I don't buy Java. Simply, it is an ugly language. If I were to start selling and marketing an all-purpose thin client solution (unlike mine, which is very purpose-specific), I would maybe build a Perl interpreter into its hardware... It would be much more appealing than Java to many programmers. (Of course, I'd have to get big bucks to do so;) )
XFree doesn't support session control in the same way that the new HotDesk does (I think); you can't just "suspend" the X as you can do with screen(1), and then move to another terminal and reattach the suspended X session there.
Have you looked at VNC (Virtual Network Computing, http://www.orl.co.uk/vnc if I recall correctly)? It's GPL'd software, and lets you do what you are looking for - and with many different operating systems, both as servers and as clients.
I have two possible solutions for you. Which one you will choose will depend on how your workplace is set up.
The first solution is to set up a full X server on a floppy-based Linux distribution - you can take a look at muLinux (http://mulinux.nevalabs.org). This solution requires 16MB RAM, in order to expand X to a RAM disk. muLinux is extremely loaded, given that it fits into one, two, three or four floppies (depending on your needs - I think you will stick with two).
A much lighter solution would be to use a smaller and more specialized distribution, such as LODS (Linux One Disk Svncviewer, http://home.rochester.rr.com/specht/lods/ ) - It has nothing but the minimum necessary to boot and fire svncviewer, a simple bash with the most basic commands, an editor to modify it... And, I think, that's about it. LODS is based on another minidistribution, Hal91 (http://home.sol.no/~okolaas/hal91/hal9 1.html), and is fairly easy to configure and modify. In fact, if you are interested, I can send you the images I use at my workplace - it just boots and fires svncviewer, which connects to your vncserver and looks just like X. Users may even think it is a diskless terminal, takes not more than two minutes to load... and, basically, works great:)
I use it on 486/33 machines with 16MB, though I'm sure it will fit on 8MB RAM. Mail me if you need more info.
According to an old article I have misplaced, Transmeta once defined itself as "fabless" - They research, do all the logic design, but when it comes to manufacturing (if it ever comes - I certainly wish it does!), they will hire another company's facilities to do so.
I worked at a school for over two years recently, as a coordinator for everything related with computers. We had pretty decent machines, and I was eager to start teaching the kids computing... What goes on inside, and how could they make it. Well, the principals didn't like it - Nor the teachers, who had NO programming experience:(
After a lot of headaches, I gave up and we taught, over and over again, Office and Internet.:(
The saddest thing is that 10 years ago kids had much simpler machines, and they DID learn programming - At least Logo (though it may seem useless, as a previous poster noted it, it helps them understand the principles of programming - Think about it, a structured, procedural language, with most bells and whistles you could ask for 10 years ago... With attention-drawing graphics... A hell of a language, IMHO, though not a general-purpose language).
Not only the encoder is important - Also the ripper is. I have been using cdparanoia as a ripper and bladeenc as an encoder (sometimes I use the grip frontend for them), and it works pretty good. Quality is as good as I can expect... Speed (for encoding) was between 0.5x and 0.6x on an AMD K6-II/400 (running Linux).
Many terminal programs (and some Linux programs too, although only when run in console mode, I think) treat it as the old XON/XOFF (better known as Ctrl-S/Ctrl-Q) combination - When you send XON, it means "hold a second, I'm a bit full - don't send any more data". Then, when you are ready to continue, you just give it a XOFF, and there you go.
I undertstand it was (don't laugh) a security measure... You see, a virus or an external attacker can make your computer think it has some extra keypunches in the buffer, and thus gain access to log into the system maliciously. Now, they can't (can they?) send Ctrl-Alt-Del
Now, maybe it was a valid security reason during the first two months of the first NT's release... But not anymore, IMHO.
Sendmail looks up your hostname before starting up, and it takes a long time for it to find if it does not succeed (for example, you blew up your eth0, erased your/etc/hosts.conf or your/etc/resolv.conf).
Try looking up any other thing, you should have the same problem - nslookup will seem to hang forever until it dies. The same if you try to ping any machine without specifying its IP.
A word of warning - There have been ENORMOUS changes between RedHat 5.2 and the current Linux versions. Kernel 2.2.x will NOT work correctly with 5.x RHs if you don't install a bunch of RPMs, including the new glibc (which may force you to rebuild many programs).
My advice? Either downgrade, or (if possible) get an updated CD.
I think your best bet would be to split the load amongst several machines. You can use aliases at the main MX machine to split the mail between several servers, the users would only have to use different POP servers, according on where their mail is stored.
You can even go further, setting up a (large) central POP server, that mounts via NFS, SMB or your favorite system the mail spool - For the users, it would be 100% transparent, like a single, large machine. This would be a good candidate for setting up a Storage Area Network: A superfast file server, and the SMTP/POP servers accessing it remotely.
Finally, maybe you could cluster together several machines to achieve some redundancy and better integration than with the SAN scheme...
Well... I run Linux on my Sun. It works MUCH better than Solaris. And as soon as I can get it running on my RS/6000 (pity, an older model:( ) I won't think twice about doing so!
vmware uses some features found in the i386 and higher chips to create virtual machines, and it emulates the shortcomings of the virtual machines. It doesn't emulate the CPU inner instruction set, so it won't run under non-Intel architectures... Maybe it will under Alpha, that somehow implements Intel emulation at hardware level - but remember, it is not free software, and you are not free to port it. I heard of a GPL project trying to do the same, but have no further information.
Same thing goes for the wine project - You need an i386-compatible system for it to work. Even with the fastest Sparc, you won't be able to boot a Windows app with it.
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Netstations have long been able to boot off Linux as a server. No software was provided to configure the Netstations from Linux, but this can be done in a Windows machine, then put in the Linux server for the Netstations to use it. In fact, using Linux as a server, I am booting 10 concurrent machines with no problems... And from the original 150MB root directory provided by IBM, I have skimmed it down to ~15MB - I only needed an X terminal, and that's just what it does now.
The operating system shipped with the NetStation is a weird, crippled, limited and client-oriented version of AIX.
I think this will be rather productive - Well, depends on your needs. For me, it's the greatest news since hot chocolate became widely available. We just bought ~100 IBM NetStations, to run an in-house developed program. The problem is, we had no way of running it on the machines - they were just X terminals. Damn good X terminals. But for every 10 machines, we needed a 192MB-RAM P-III server. Now (I hope), we will be able to use our old trusty 486 as a file server, and run the apps on the Netstation itself!
I just used a kitchen knife to kill someone. Is the knife manufacturer to be held responsible? Will we need that from now on all knifes will be made of plastic, to avoid injuries? I don't think so.
You give out an excellent tool for monitoring (say, SATAN). Someone will find an evil way to use it. In fact, almost every single piece of software can be held responsible for damages: Sendmail for sending spam, rm for removing files which were not supposed to be removed, Gnome for being the cracker's environment, Linux for being such an allowing operating system that allowed him to put malformed packets in the network... And it could go on and on...
There's a big difference between well-skilled IT professionals, like Miguel, and the average illegal immigrant. I am not supporting the drain of Mexicans into the US, that's harmful for both countries and - specially - for the people that actually cross the border. But Miguel, I think, has a very different case. Denying a visa to someone like him seems plainly stupid - without taking into account what you or I think about it. You prefer having him in Mexico, I also do... But he does not. And he is perfectly qualified to take the decision.
And for the record, his family lives in the USA. The only thing preventing him from living there was the lack of a visa, because he doesn't have a degree... Who needs a degree when having the knowledge?
Anyway...
Well... It started with a floppy, back then when few people used modems, and most modems were = 2400 bps. It doesn't work anymore - too small. Great, now we have CDs. But... Don't you think that with xDSL installed at home you will also find CDs useless?
Depends on the magazine and on the ads. Sometimes (remember Computer Shopper) the ads are worth more than the content itself. Sometimes, ads are very welcome.
:)
:)
On UNIX and networking magazines, which are the only ones I buy, I like browsing through the magazine, looking more at the ads than at the content, before actually reading the magazine, so I can grasp the one or two interesting ones, and ignore the rest of them. It's not that hard to do, because most full-page ads are on the same side of the magazine, and I usually fold it along the center when I read it
Of course, I would love to remove ads from general public magazines... Except by the fact that I'm not interested in them, and I never read them
The only problem is that it is really hard to read a web-page on your way to work, on a plane, while in the bathroom, when someone is using your computer, in your bed... Paper is still very useful.
I think printed computer magazines still have a long way to live... But there will not be as many as there are now. The ones that can be easily and relatively painlessly merged or converted to portals will do so. We will, however, stay with a couple dozens of computer magazines of varying technical levels.
They keep saying that the US is the land of the free - An I understand from that that they want everybody to be as free as they are. Also, they keep saying they are commited to having the best IT people working with them.
And then, I see this. Miguel, a brilliant and very recognized and skilled programmer, has been trying to move to the US for several years already. I would never dream of doing so, but anyway - It's not me. I'd prefer having him stay in Mexico (in UNAM, in fact)... He wants to leave, so be it...
The US government is, I think, among the blindest entities ever to exist. What more accreditation do you need than to see this guy's work? Unbelievable...
I would say that, according to your logic, Win2000 will be the smallest operating system on earth - None of the lines of code bring the system into an operational state :)
In Mexico, I have seen IT salaries ranging from about $3,000 to $30,000 a year (extremely under- and over-paid - it would be more real to say it goes from $7,000 to $15,000, it's much more usual).
However, that doesn't mean we are underpaid; the cost of living in Mexico is WAY under what you would expect... I have a relatively expensive way of living, and I spend about 15 dollars a day. It is not hard to live (and pretty decently) with about 5 dollars a day. In fact, the minimum wages go at US$2.2 per day - and many people live with less than that.
802.11 is very secure - Secure according even to military standards. I don't have the exact data handy, but there are basically two variants:
- Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum
- Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum
The good one, accodring to most experts, is FHSS. Your two points of communication agree on a common, long key, and they transmit data shifting their band according to the key. It's nearly impossible to interfere, even harder to decode, and very resistent to frequency jamming.
I suggest you to take a look at Breezecom, they have very good equipment for 802.11 (we use it here in Mexico, no problems whatsoever, very easy to set up, and much more reliable than a wire-based network)
A lot of the mouses (most of them) that you can find in a store have already a little wheel or up-down key, useful for scrolling inside a window... Well, how would you like having a mouse that displays thin rays to the X, Y and Z axes (in order to help you locate your reality in a 2D monitor). The wheel would move you front/back, and the mouse would be up/down/left/right. OK, maybe not 100% a 3D input device - But at least much more confortable than holding up your hand in a glove 8 hours a day!
I have been setting up some thin clients based on our old (8MB, no hard disk) 486s. I boot off a floppy based on a modified LODS, which in turn is a modified Hal91 distribution. The machines are too small to boot X (thus, I can't use muLinux - it needs at least 16MB to boot X). VNC is ideal for me, I can have one big server with 10 running copies of the application I provide to the clients, which are completely stateless - you just boot the client and it appears exactly where you left it. On a LAN, display speed is perfectly comparable to X, and it can also be deployed (albeit VERY slowly) over a modem.
;) )
;)
I don't buy Java. Simply, it is an ugly language. If I were to start selling and marketing an all-purpose thin client solution (unlike mine, which is very purpose-specific), I would maybe build a Perl interpreter into its hardware... It would be much more appealing than Java to many programmers. (Of course, I'd have to get big bucks to do so
Anyway, my 20 mexican cents worth
XFree doesn't support session control in the same way that the new HotDesk does (I think); you can't just "suspend" the X as you can do with screen(1), and then move to another terminal and reattach the suspended X session there.
Have you looked at VNC (Virtual Network Computing, http://www.orl.co.uk/vnc if I recall correctly)? It's GPL'd software, and lets you do what you are looking for - and with many different operating systems, both as servers and as clients.
I have two possible solutions for you. Which one you will choose will depend on how your workplace is set up.
:)
The first solution is to set up a full X server on a floppy-based Linux distribution - you can take a look at muLinux (http://mulinux.nevalabs.org). This solution requires 16MB RAM, in order to expand X to a RAM disk. muLinux is extremely loaded, given that it fits into one, two, three or four floppies (depending on your needs - I think you will stick with two).
A much lighter solution would be to use a smaller and more specialized distribution, such as LODS (Linux One Disk Svncviewer, http://home.rochester.rr.com/specht/lods/ ) - It has nothing but the minimum necessary to boot and fire svncviewer, a simple bash with the most basic commands, an editor to modify it... And, I think, that's about it. LODS is based on another minidistribution, Hal91 (http://home.sol.no/~okolaas/hal91/hal9 1.html), and is fairly easy to configure and modify. In fact, if you are interested, I can send you the images I use at my workplace - it just boots and fires svncviewer, which connects to your vncserver and looks just like X. Users may even think it is a diskless terminal, takes not more than two minutes to load... and, basically, works great
I use it on 486/33 machines with 16MB, though I'm sure it will fit on 8MB RAM. Mail me if you need more info.
According to an old article I have misplaced, Transmeta once defined itself as "fabless" - They research, do all the logic design, but when it comes to manufacturing (if it ever comes - I certainly wish it does!), they will hire another company's facilities to do so.
I worked at a school for over two years recently, as a coordinator for everything related with computers. We had pretty decent machines, and I was eager to start teaching the kids computing... What goes on inside, and how could they make it. Well, the principals didn't like it - Nor the teachers, who had NO programming experience :(
:(
After a lot of headaches, I gave up and we taught, over and over again, Office and Internet.
The saddest thing is that 10 years ago kids had much simpler machines, and they DID learn programming - At least Logo (though it may seem useless, as a previous poster noted it, it helps them understand the principles of programming - Think about it, a structured, procedural language, with most bells and whistles you could ask for 10 years ago... With attention-drawing graphics... A hell of a language, IMHO, though not a general-purpose language).
The best of lucks with the project!
Not only the encoder is important - Also the ripper is. I have been using cdparanoia as a ripper and bladeenc as an encoder (sometimes I use the grip frontend for them), and it works pretty good. Quality is as good as I can expect... Speed (for encoding) was between 0.5x and 0.6x on an AMD K6-II/400 (running Linux).
Many terminal programs (and some Linux programs too, although only when run in console mode, I think) treat it as the old XON/XOFF (better known as Ctrl-S/Ctrl-Q) combination - When you send XON, it means "hold a second, I'm a bit full - don't send any more data". Then, when you are ready to continue, you just give it a XOFF, and there you go.
(or was it the other way around?
I undertstand it was (don't laugh) a security measure... You see, a virus or an external attacker can make your computer think it has some extra keypunches in the buffer, and thus gain access to log into the system maliciously. Now, they can't (can they?) send Ctrl-Alt-Del
Now, maybe it was a valid security reason during the first two months of the first NT's release... But not anymore, IMHO.
Sendmail looks up your hostname before starting up, and it takes a long time for it to find if it does not succeed (for example, you blew up your eth0, erased your /etc/hosts.conf or your /etc/resolv.conf).
Try looking up any other thing, you should have the same problem - nslookup will seem to hang forever until it dies. The same if you try to ping any machine without specifying its IP.
A word of warning - There have been ENORMOUS changes between RedHat 5.2 and the current Linux versions. Kernel 2.2.x will NOT work correctly with 5.x RHs if you don't install a bunch of RPMs, including the new glibc (which may force you to rebuild many programs).
My advice? Either downgrade, or (if possible) get an updated CD.
Ougadougou.
;)
Why so may vowels? Well, try s/ou/br/g... I think Brgadbrgbr wouldn't be much better
I think your best bet would be to split the load amongst several machines. You can use aliases at the main MX machine to split the mail between several servers, the users would only have to use different POP servers, according on where their mail is stored.
You can even go further, setting up a (large) central POP server, that mounts via NFS, SMB or your favorite system the mail spool - For the users, it would be 100% transparent, like a single, large machine. This would be a good candidate for setting up a Storage Area Network: A superfast file server, and the SMTP/POP servers accessing it remotely.
Finally, maybe you could cluster together several machines to achieve some redundancy and better integration than with the SAN scheme...
Well... I run Linux on my Sun. It works MUCH better than Solaris. And as soon as I can get it running on my RS/6000 (pity, an older model :( ) I won't think twice about doing so!
(and I'm not the only one thinking this way...)
Well... You can forget about it :)
vmware uses some features found in the i386 and higher chips to create virtual machines, and it emulates the shortcomings of the virtual machines. It doesn't emulate the CPU inner instruction set, so it won't run under non-Intel architectures... Maybe it will under Alpha, that somehow implements Intel emulation at hardware level - but remember, it is not free software, and you are not free to port it. I heard of a GPL project trying to do the same, but have no further information.
Same thing goes for the wine project - You need an i386-compatible system for it to work. Even with the fastest Sparc, you won't be able to boot a Windows app with it.