I've been touch typing since the one class I took in 9th grade on yes, a good old IBM Selectric. I firmly believe that typing or 'keyboarding' as it is often called these days is an essential skill.
I'm constantly amazed by all the moron software engineers around me who hunt and peck. Learn to use the technology, people!
Ok, I don't have access to my Fedora Core 2, test2, system at the moment. However, Fedora Core 2 will most definitely be running a 2.6.5 kernel when released. The current Fedora devel kernel is 2.6.5.300-something. My understanding is that Fedora Core 2 will form the base of RHEL 4.X.
The only area I'm aware of them making kernel modifications is to the SELinux features, but then Fedora is currently pushing the state of the art in SELinux implementation. That's ok in my book.
Before everyone rips on Red Hat, you should at least take the trouble to see what they are actually using in their latest test release.
I admit that I was skeptical when RH announced they were dropping their standard/free distro, but Fedora has made me a believer again.
Well, that was enough for me, I AM gone. I called Comcast Tuesday night, and was installed by 5pm Wednesday afternoon.
I still have all the channels I care about, with the kid's TVs now hooked up to basic cable, and I'm getting a lower price than with Dish. On top of that, I got a $150 immediate credit for dumping Dish, plus another $300 in credits amounting to six months free broadband.
The only thing I don't have now is my Dish PVR, but Comcast is introducing that feature in my area next month.
Too bad, Charlie. You pissed me off by putting me in the middle of your argument. All I needed was an excuse to switch over, and you gave it to me.
Check the 'Full Screen Interstitial' example. It isn't Flash, but Windows Media Player. It bails right away if you aren't running IE with the right version of media player. Also requires Javascript.
Given the bias on Slashdot, I'm assuming most of you don't know that Linux already runs on Itanium boxes with EFI. All of HP's Itanium boxes have EFI on them, so it doesn't have anything to with banning the use of Linux.
I've been one of those evil System and Network administrators for over a decade now. Most of that time has been spent supporting software development labs.
I don't know what planet you or the author of that article live on, but I've seen a steady increase in the quality of software development and maturity in the development models used in the last decade. This may have slowed our development a bit, but you can see the results in our defect find rates. We're delivering a much better product than we used to.
Rather than just hacking out some code, doing a perfunctory test, and throwing it over the wall to be released, our developers are actually managed these days and do this cool thing called "planning." Yes, they actually investigate, propose, design, implement, and test code on a schedule. We even have teams dedicated to testing the systems to make sure they work. Oh, the horror!
In a decent software lab, which I consider mine to be, most of our management is also made up of engineers who rose through the ranks. These people know their stuff and trust the engineers beneath them.
In my area at least, we've also seen a large increase in the complexity of systems as well. No longer are our engineers programming a lone application to slap on a PC or a server. Our projects are large and distributed across multiple networks and servers. We have to traverse firewalls and worry about security trust domains and lots of other things that nobody cared about a decade ago.
I think that this increase in complexity of projects is likely responsible for the entire list of negative consequences that the article attributes to 'role fragmentation'. The only one I'd leave out is "de-skilling of the workforce". That may have been true in 2000, but the layoffs of the last few years have forced everyone to do work that was once done by multiple people.
All of that requires more attention to detail, and requires more effort to get right. I don't see that as good or bad, it simply is. Get used to it and stop whining about having to actually plan something and coordinate with others.
Apparently you didn't read HP's quarterly report that came out about two weeks ago - all divisions were profitable,/. anti-HP bigotry notwithstanding.
The highlights:
- Revenue of $19.9 billion, up 10% year-over-year; compares to analyst consensus estimates of $19.0 billion - Non-GAAP operating profit of $1.4 billion, up 63% year-over-year; Non-GAAP EPS $0.36, up 50% year-over-year; compares to analyst consensus estimates of $0.35 - GAAP operating profit of $1.1 billion, up 152% year-over-year; GAAP EPS $0.28, up 115% year-over-year - Cash flow from operations totals $2.4 billion - All businesses post strong revenue and record unit shipments - All businesses profitable; Enterprise Systems returns to profitability with $106 million operating profit
Yeah, HP is sure going down the tubes, making a billion dollars in a quarter. You people fucking amaze me.
As usual, the/. crowd is busy ignoring HP whenever they talk about Sun, but that's par for the course.
However, in this case don't have a clue what you are talking about. HP's SuperDome sales have been growing like gangbusters for the past two years.
HP's partitioning and management technology blows away anything Sun has on the market. Above all, HP gives customers what they want - the Integrity SuperDomes can run HP-UX, Windows, Linux and soon OpenVMS - all on the same machine at the same time. That's called choice, and that's why Sun is dying off. HP (and even IBM) are just better at giving customers what they want. Sun thinks they know what customers want - and they are wrong.
I have a circa 1993 Sparc IPX workstation with various accessories including a 19" color monitor. I bought the whole thing for $20 when my company was clearing out the old junk back in '99. Its currently running Red Hat 6.2, but I suppose it could use an update.:)
As opposed to the current European leftist definition of 'empire' - "We love American movies and culture so much we can't get enough of it"?
Or another European leftist definition: 'stability' - "We love bloodthirsty, murderous, dictators, as long as TotalFinaElf gets it's share of the oil money."
The irony of the Left bitching about the US overthrowing Saddam is incredible, given the last few decades of them bitching about us supporting evil, murderous, third world dictators. If anyone else had done this, it would be a good thing, but if the US does it, we must be wrong.
I'm sure all the dead Iraqis that Saddam murdered by the thousands would agree with you. Yeah, those ones from the mass graves we keep finding in Iraq. God forbid we take out a murdering, fascist dictatorship and upset somebody.
Fuck the WMDs and any link to 9/11. What the US did in Iraq was RIGHT from any kind of conceivable moral standpoint. The cowards in Europe and the UN are just having a hard time digesting the difference between peace and justice.
Personally, I'm astonished that anyone who calls themself an 'environmentalist' could possibly think that pouring millions of tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere each year could be better than radioactive waste, buried deep underground.
Bring on the nuclear power and dump the fossil fuels! Thank God someone in government has some sense.
You don't know what you are talking about. Tivoli is a network management software package, roughly similar to OpenView. N1 is a (hypothetical/slideware) data center architecture and management system that comprises both hardware and software. Do some reading on Terraspring, whom Sun aquired last year, and you'll have a good feel for N1.
And a warrant means what, exactly, when I or my ISP , or whomever, has the enable password to that pretty Cisco 6509 switch sitting downstream from you? If this feature is implemented, it WILL be used by someone.
But you don't have kids, and apparently know nothing about parenting. Your 'sense' of the issue is completely wrong.
We call them 'children' because they are not adults. They do not have the same rights and particularly don't have the same sense of responsibility as adults. Your grandiose sense of parental nobility will quickly evaporate when you do have children. Half your job for the first few years is just keep them alive from risks like light sockets, busy streets, falling down stairs, etc. As they get older, you'll be shocked at just how immature and irresponsible they can be, even while having the ability to act 'adult' most of the time.
As a parent of three, ages 9, 4, and 2, I say bravo to the school district for helping busy parents out. I have a right to any and all information on my kid's schooling, just as often as I can get it. Anything that facilitates the transfer of that information is an improvement.
Alternative energy is a dead end. There just doesn't exist any alternative energy source that is capable of producing enough energy for mankind's (ever growing) needs. You need to go really large-scale, or it won't make a dent in the total amount of energy needed.
I refer you to this article
by Steven Den Beste talking about amounts of energy produced by various technologies. (He starts with biodiesel but moves on from there.)
Personally, I think nuclear energy is the only realistic way to go, but like Den Beste, I admit that nuclear power is politically dead. On average, nuclear waste is by far the most containable pollution compared to anything releasing massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. IMHO, being an 'environmentalist' and being anti-nuclear power is nonsensical.
I have a friend who has been unemployed for 18 months because he refuses to do anything with Windows. He won't even use Internet Explorer and comes off sounding like a moron when he complains that someone's website doesn't work right with Mozilla.
Unless you are willing to build your own laptop, you are an idealistic idiot. Go back to the romper room and leave the real world to the adults.
I've been happily using Linux for over a decade, and I still use Windows all the time too. Each has it's uses.
Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth Of sun-split clouds...and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of...wheeled and soared and swung High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there, I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung My eager craft through footless halls of air. Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace Where never lark, or even eagle flew. And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod The high untrespassed sanctity of space Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
'High Flight' by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
I wept in 1986 as a child, now I do it again as a man. Goodbye and Godspeed...
- Necron69
Did you crack my server?
on
Ask Kevin Mitnick
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The time, April 1994. The place - Colorado Supernet (think *.csn.org) in Boulder, Colorado. I was a green as hell newbie sysadmin on my second job out of college. One day, federal marshals show up with search warrants and lawyers from a large, American electronics manufacturer. They are looking for stolen PROM code for cell phones, and they think it is on our machines (it was). It turns out someone did some "human engineering" on a gullible IT person somewhere and downloaded the code without having to crack anything. This person then backtracked through a long list of hacked accounts across the Internet to cover their tracks.
The search process shut SuperNet down for almost three days. We couldn't answer the phones, check email, or even touch our servers. It seemed certain that this was the last straw in a long list of problems, and that the company would fold. In a panic, I quit that job two weeks later. That was a bad decision, as it turns out, but one I still hold the mysterious cracker responsible for. That person changed my life, and not for the better.
(BTW, this technology has been around for a number of years.)
I'm not sure how it works in other states, but in Colorado, a pharmacist must check every prescription by law. My father is a pharmacist for a large HMO in Denver, and a result of that law, he now spends his days sitting at the end of a conveyer belt, comparing the pills in the robot filled bottles to those on a computer screen - 8 hours a day.
Needless to say, he hates this something fierce. It isn't hard to imagine a day in the future where the pharmacist gets removed from the loop though. Fortunately, he is about to retire.
Let's think about this rationally for a moment. The FY 2003 budget for NASA is $15.1 billion, of which $6.1 billion is for human space flight.
The
ESA Human spaceflight budget is a bit harder to pin down due to multi-year authorizations and various breakdowns, but appears to be about 1 billion euros for the four year period from 2002-2006, so roughly 250 million euros per year. Note from the link that the bulk of this figure is contributions to the ISS, not human spacecraft development.
Since the euro and dollar are roughly equivalent lately, at current levels the ESA would need to increase it's human spaceflight budget by 24X just to match NASA spending on the same. However, at that level, NASA isn't even vaguely contemplating a return to the Moon, much less going to Mars.
Given the current economic situation in Europe, I'd put the chance of any of this happening at just about zero.
When (if?) mankind finally returns to the moon, it will most likely be via a private company in some sort of for-profit venture. Unless there is some sort of new political goal to be gained, governments will not (and should not, IMHO) be part of the picture. Its just too damn expensive for taxpayers to stomach.
- Necron69
Slashdot Mirror
Technically speaking, it wasn't a flight suit 'costume', it was a flight _suit_.
That being said, it was an idiotic stunt, and no, I didn't vote for the man either time.
- Necron69
Repeat after me: "You have no right to privacy in public." (especially when you are outdoors)
Seriously, which three of you didn't already think the goverment was doing this?
- Necron69
I've been touch typing since the one class I took in 9th grade on yes, a good old IBM Selectric. I firmly believe that typing or 'keyboarding' as it is often called these days is an essential skill.
I'm constantly amazed by all the moron software engineers around me who hunt and peck. Learn to use the technology, people!
- Necron69
Ok, I don't have access to my Fedora Core 2, test2, system at the moment. However, Fedora Core 2 will most definitely be running a 2.6.5 kernel when released. The current Fedora devel kernel is 2.6.5.300-something. My understanding is that Fedora Core 2 will form the base of RHEL 4.X.
The only area I'm aware of them making kernel modifications is to the SELinux features, but then Fedora is currently pushing the state of the art in SELinux implementation. That's ok in my book.
Before everyone rips on Red Hat, you should at least take the trouble to see what they are actually using in their latest test release.
I admit that I was skeptical when RH announced they were dropping their standard/free distro, but Fedora has made me a believer again.
- Necron69
Well, that was enough for me, I AM gone. I called Comcast Tuesday night, and was installed by 5pm Wednesday afternoon.
I still have all the channels I care about, with the kid's TVs now hooked up to basic cable, and I'm getting a lower price than with Dish. On top of that, I got a $150 immediate credit for dumping Dish, plus another $300 in credits amounting to six months free broadband.
The only thing I don't have now is my Dish PVR, but Comcast is introducing that feature in my area next month.
Too bad, Charlie. You pissed me off by putting me in the middle of your argument. All I needed was an excuse to switch over, and you gave it to me.
Bye-bye,
- Necron69
Had to be said. :)
- Necron69
Look at the HTML source at:
:)
http://www.unicast.com/gallery/
Check the 'Full Screen Interstitial' example. It isn't Flash, but Windows Media Player. It bails right away if you aren't running IE with the right version of media player. Also requires Javascript.
Not a problem for me.
- Necron69
Given the bias on Slashdot, I'm assuming most of you don't know that Linux already runs on Itanium boxes with EFI. All of HP's Itanium boxes have EFI on them, so it doesn't have anything to with banning the use of Linux.
- Necron69
I've been one of those evil System and Network administrators for over a decade now. Most of that time has been spent supporting software development labs.
I don't know what planet you or the author of that article live on, but I've seen a steady increase in the quality of software development and maturity in the development models used in the last decade. This may have slowed our development a bit, but you can see the results in our defect find rates. We're delivering a much better product than we used to.
Rather than just hacking out some code, doing a perfunctory test, and throwing it over the wall to be released, our developers are actually managed these days and do this cool thing called "planning." Yes, they actually investigate, propose, design, implement, and test code on a schedule. We even have teams dedicated to testing the systems to make sure they work. Oh, the horror!
In a decent software lab, which I consider mine to be, most of our management is also made up of engineers who rose through the ranks. These people know their stuff and trust the engineers beneath them.
In my area at least, we've also seen a large increase in the complexity of systems as well. No longer are our engineers programming a lone application to slap on a PC or a server. Our projects are large and distributed across multiple networks and servers. We have to traverse firewalls and worry about security trust domains and lots of other things that nobody cared about a decade ago.
I think that this increase in complexity of projects is likely responsible for the entire list of negative consequences that the article attributes to 'role fragmentation'. The only one I'd leave out is "de-skilling of the workforce". That may have been true in 2000, but the layoffs of the last few years have forced everyone to do work that was once done by multiple people.
All of that requires more attention to detail, and requires more effort to get right. I don't see that as good or bad, it simply is. Get used to it and stop whining about having to actually plan something and coordinate with others.
- Necron69
Apparently you didn't read HP's quarterly report that came out about two weeks ago - all divisions were profitable, /. anti-HP bigotry notwithstanding.
The highlights:
- Revenue of $19.9 billion, up 10% year-over-year; compares to analyst consensus estimates of $19.0 billion
- Non-GAAP operating profit of $1.4 billion, up 63% year-over-year; Non-GAAP EPS $0.36, up 50% year-over-year; compares to analyst consensus estimates of $0.35
- GAAP operating profit of $1.1 billion, up 152% year-over-year; GAAP EPS $0.28, up 115% year-over-year
- Cash flow from operations totals $2.4 billion
- All businesses post strong revenue and record unit shipments
- All businesses profitable; Enterprise Systems returns to profitability with $106 million operating profit
Yeah, HP is sure going down the tubes, making a billion dollars in a quarter. You people fucking amaze me.
- Necron69
As usual, the /. crowd is busy ignoring HP whenever they talk about Sun, but that's par for the course.
However, in this case don't have a clue what you are talking about. HP's SuperDome sales have been growing like gangbusters for the past two years.
HP's partitioning and management technology blows away anything Sun has on the market. Above all, HP gives customers what they want - the Integrity SuperDomes can run HP-UX, Windows, Linux and soon OpenVMS - all on the same machine at the same time. That's called choice, and that's why Sun is dying off. HP (and even IBM) are just better at giving customers what they want. Sun thinks they know what customers want - and they are wrong.
- Necron69
I have a circa 1993 Sparc IPX workstation with various accessories including a 19" color monitor. I bought the whole thing for $20 when my company was clearing out the old junk back in '99. Its currently running Red Hat 6.2, but I suppose it could use an update. :)
- Necron69
As opposed to the current European leftist definition of 'empire' - "We love American movies and culture so much we can't get enough of it"?
Or another European leftist definition: 'stability' - "We love bloodthirsty, murderous, dictators, as long as TotalFinaElf gets it's share of the oil money."
The irony of the Left bitching about the US overthrowing Saddam is incredible, given the last few decades of them bitching about us supporting evil, murderous, third world dictators. If anyone else had done this, it would be a good thing, but if the US does it, we must be wrong.
Excuse me while I go puke...
- Necron69
I'm sure all the dead Iraqis that Saddam murdered by the thousands would agree with you. Yeah, those ones from the mass graves we keep finding in Iraq. God forbid we take out a murdering, fascist dictatorship and upset somebody.
Fuck the WMDs and any link to 9/11. What the US did in Iraq was RIGHT from any kind of conceivable moral standpoint. The cowards in Europe and the UN are just having a hard time digesting the difference between peace and justice.
- Necron69
Personally, I'm astonished that anyone who calls themself an 'environmentalist' could possibly think that pouring millions of tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere each year could be better than radioactive waste, buried deep underground.
Bring on the nuclear power and dump the fossil fuels! Thank God someone in government has some sense.
- Necron69
You don't know what you are talking about. Tivoli is a network management software package, roughly similar to OpenView. N1 is a (hypothetical/slideware) data center architecture and management system that comprises both hardware and software. Do some reading on Terraspring, whom Sun aquired last year, and you'll have a good feel for N1.
- Necron69
Took you long enough. We were talking about how insecure telnet was when I worked at CU back in '93. :)
- Necron69
And a warrant means what, exactly, when I or my ISP , or whomever, has the enable password to that pretty Cisco 6509 switch sitting downstream from you? If this feature is implemented, it WILL be used by someone.
- Necron69
But you don't have kids, and apparently know nothing about parenting. Your 'sense' of the issue is completely wrong.
We call them 'children' because they are not adults. They do not have the same rights and particularly don't have the same sense of responsibility as adults. Your grandiose sense of parental nobility will quickly evaporate when you do have children. Half your job for the first few years is just keep them alive from risks like light sockets, busy streets, falling down stairs, etc. As they get older, you'll be shocked at just how immature and irresponsible they can be, even while having the ability to act 'adult' most of the time.
As a parent of three, ages 9, 4, and 2, I say bravo to the school district for helping busy parents out. I have a right to any and all information on my kid's schooling, just as often as I can get it. Anything that facilitates the transfer of that information is an improvement.
- Necron69
I refer you to this article by Steven Den Beste talking about amounts of energy produced by various technologies. (He starts with biodiesel but moves on from there.)
Personally, I think nuclear energy is the only realistic way to go, but like Den Beste, I admit that nuclear power is politically dead. On average, nuclear waste is by far the most containable pollution compared to anything releasing massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. IMHO, being an 'environmentalist' and being anti-nuclear power is nonsensical.
- Necron69
I have a friend who has been unemployed for 18 months because he refuses to do anything with Windows. He won't even use Internet Explorer and comes off sounding like a moron when he complains that someone's website doesn't work right with Mozilla.
Unless you are willing to build your own laptop, you are an idealistic idiot. Go back to the romper room and leave the real world to the adults.
I've been happily using Linux for over a decade, and I still use Windows all the time too. Each has it's uses.
- Necron69
Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds...and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of...wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew.
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
'High Flight' by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
I wept in 1986 as a child, now I do it again as a man. Goodbye and Godspeed...
- Necron69
The time, April 1994. The place - Colorado Supernet (think *.csn.org) in Boulder, Colorado. I was a green as hell newbie sysadmin on my second job out of college. One day, federal marshals show up with search warrants and lawyers from a large, American electronics manufacturer. They are looking for stolen PROM code for cell phones, and they think it is on our machines (it was). It turns out someone did some "human engineering" on a gullible IT person somewhere and downloaded the code without having to crack anything. This person then backtracked through a long list of hacked accounts across the Internet to cover their tracks.
The search process shut SuperNet down for almost three days. We couldn't answer the phones, check email, or even touch our servers. It seemed certain that this was the last straw in a long list of problems, and that the company would fold. In a panic, I quit that job two weeks later. That was a bad decision, as it turns out, but one I still hold the mysterious cracker responsible for. That person changed my life, and not for the better.
So, was it you?
- Necron69
(BTW, this technology has been around for a number of years.)
I'm not sure how it works in other states, but in Colorado, a pharmacist must check every prescription by law. My father is a pharmacist for a large HMO in Denver, and a result of that law, he now spends his days sitting at the end of a conveyer belt, comparing the pills in the robot filled bottles to those on a computer screen - 8 hours a day.
Needless to say, he hates this something fierce. It isn't hard to imagine a day in the future where the pharmacist gets removed from the loop though. Fortunately, he is about to retire.
- Necron69
The ESA Human spaceflight budget is a bit harder to pin down due to multi-year authorizations and various breakdowns, but appears to be about 1 billion euros for the four year period from 2002-2006, so roughly 250 million euros per year. Note from the link that the bulk of this figure is contributions to the ISS, not human spacecraft development.
Since the euro and dollar are roughly equivalent lately, at current levels the ESA would need to increase it's human spaceflight budget by 24X just to match NASA spending on the same. However, at that level, NASA isn't even vaguely contemplating a return to the Moon, much less going to Mars.
Given the current economic situation in Europe, I'd put the chance of any of this happening at just about zero.
When (if?) mankind finally returns to the moon, it will most likely be via a private company in some sort of for-profit venture. Unless there is some sort of new political goal to be gained, governments will not (and should not, IMHO) be part of the picture. Its just too damn expensive for taxpayers to stomach. - Necron69