1.) Extra power cables (or 2 extras) - one for work, one for home and one to take with you 2.) Extra batteries - My Dell precision has a place for a second battery - I have 3 and I can travel on a 8 hour plane trip and still have enough juice for playing 3D games or watching movies for the whole trip! 3.) 802.11x card if it's not internal already 4.) USB 2.0 card if it's not internal already 5.) USB infrared mouse - I hate the touchpad. You cna't play games with a touchpad!!! 6.) A keyboard light (think geek has a cheap USB one) if you don't want to turn on the room light and keep everyone up - also good if people are watching TV in a dark room and you need to type. 7.) Good, but cheap foldable headphones. You want something that you can pack with you on a trip, so you can watch movies or play games on the plane - I bought a pair of sony headphones for like $10 and it's REALLY worth it! I hate earbuds, so I got normal headphones that are foldable.
What NOT to buy:
* Don't get the APC "Power case" with th universal adapter. I plugged it into a car charger and it TOTALLY FRIED my old computer's ability to recharge batteries. Bad, Bad, Bad, !!! After I used up all of my batteries (copying all my work off the machine) I had a worthless hunk of plastic and silicon - and APC didn't do a thing about it.
What ISP does he use for wireless/microwave? Is it Mesa Networks? I've tried to get Mesa Networks in my area north of Denver (Longmont) and it's not available.
I've seen this before, but never actually done it:
Set up a linux machine as an application server and have the machine basicially do a diskless boot from the linux partition (read only). Then, have a disk on the actual machine that they can write to (save game files, etc...). I've seen this done before but don't ask me how to do it.
Anyway, that way, you're sure that every time the kid boots the machine, he/she is getting a clean OS and they can save their data to their own disk and not interfere with the other users or the OS.
You should be using a VPN if you have two offices and two firewalls. Unless your debian machines ARE your firewalls, then NFS or samba would be fine. However, machines will still lock or be slow of the internet gets slow or you drop a connection from one place to another.
Linus developed the Linux kernel to provide a free unix alternative to the masses. The FSF (GNU) people headed by R. Stallman are HUGE proponents of free software. These two people (and groups) are the people who brought Linux up as a child.
Redhat stood on the shoulders of giants and prettied-up the whole thing and offered commercial support for the product. Now they're cutting the cord with the open source community - throwing all of their crap into an O.S. project (Fedora) and putting all of their effort into the new RHEL.
Q: Don't you feel that you've just shot yourself in the foot? You're going against the community - and the community has made RH what it is today!
You should be ashamed of yourself and Stallman and Linus should never return any of your emails or calls.
The Linux Hardware Database doesn't exist anymore - it used to be owned by ZDNET, but they nuked the whole site a while ago. I sent in an e-mail to the tech department and requested that they ressurect the site, but there has been no action. The site is for the most part dead.
Pine has had threadding for a couple of years, but not configurable threadded display modes. You can even make it look like mutt's threads (there's an option for that now) if you want, so you don't have to deal with the ancient elm-like commands that mutt had. 8)
The whole article is BS. I just ripped the CD the other night for my fiance'. She wanted one of the songs off it for our wedding and our DJ only allows MP3s, so I used the "real player" under Win2k on an Inspiron 3700 and ripped the whole thing. I didn't play it, but I assume that this protection is meant to foil the copying, not the playing, right, so obviously it doesn't work. The article is BS.
Try the Archos jukebox recorder It has a 6 Gig drive in it, batteries last for ~10 hours, records directly to mp3. Has USB and works with linux. What more could you want? There's also a 20 Gig version. Url here
Just one of the standard interview questions, I guess, but I personally would like to see Microsoft working on their "Quality" as opposed to the "Quantity" of software. I wouldn't hate MS so much if I couldn't easily slam their products like I can now. Microsoft OSs don't have good uptimes. Microsoft products have security issues out the wazoo. Microsoft has their hands in everyone's pockets, but they're not trustworthy (as far as quality software goes).
Q: Where do you see Microsoft in 5 years?
Q: What will you change about Microsoft if you were CEO?
Just get like 200 e-mail addresses and back up your stuff to some online backup service that gives you a free 200 megs of free diskspace or whatever. Sure, you'll saturate your internet connection, but what the hey, it's your data, right? 8)
Classes can get you down because the end result is usually lame. The way to get around boredom if you like programming is to find an interesting project. I've worked in the Air traffic control industry and I'm writing games in my spare time to keep my hand in something that I enjoy writing. My daily job is boring as hell, but I still love programming because I keep myself doing interesting things with it. CS isn't boring, just some of the projects are...
I'm a linux sysadmin and I use PGP to encrypt root passwords when I change them on some Army machines that I remotely admin. The weird thing was that the Army personel (at 6 different sites around the US) didn't know how to even USE PGP when I sent them things. I had to hold their hands over the phone and show them how to decrypt the information.
It seems to me that only people who REQUIRE encryption (terrorists, and your basic bad guys) and highly-technical people (anyone reading this e-mail) even bothers to encrypt their e-mail or their data (not counting commercial SSL in web browsers, since that's automatic). Shouldn't our government FORCE all of their communications to be encrypted and give all military personel training in this sort of thing? I'm sure that the bad guys (whomever they are) are all sitting around a table learning how to encrypt data, but in our country it seems that even the people who SHOULD be encrypting their data don't even know how to.
I was browsing around on freshmeat yesterday and found a utility to e-mail infected hosts - it's called codeblue and the URL is here. It scans apache logs and e-mails the infected host with the info.
I was at Siggraph and I thought that it was rendering at higher than 2.5 FPS - it looked more like 5 or 6 FPS, but I could've been wrong. I snapped a photo of it. It can be found here
I never learned java - I always was waiting for it to become more stable and/or faster and more "native" - I stayed with C, C++, Perl and pretty much everything else, while my other programmer-buddies all gravitated towards java without any questions. Since then, I've become a sysadmin and I know that java is very fragmented already and will just continue to become more so. I know that this is a totally religous argument, so I won't go on an on about why one language is better than others, but most programmers, once they learn java, use it for everything no matter what the problem or task at hand and I think that's just ignorant - there's always a "best" tool for every job and java isn't it in a lot of cases.
Here's a link that I found to be particularly elightening, although a little out of date, check it out: Things that suck about JAVA (not written by me).
Here's the rant by Jamie Zawinski (author of xscreensaver, xkeycaps, among many other linux greats,...): java sucks.
See, it's not just me!
--
Steven Webb
System Administrator II - Juneau and TECOM projects
NCAR - Research Applications Program
Go to: iwantspam.com and register. -- Steven Webb System Administrator II - Juneau and TECOM projects NCAR - Research Applications Program
I've developed GUI apps under Win, Mac, UNIX, Amig
on
Why Develop On Linux?
·
· Score: 2
I started as an Amiga guy, then switched to Windows, then to Linux. A few years ago, I had to write an app that I had to port to Windows and Mac, so I have programming experience in most "flavors" of the major OSs of today.
In short, there are pros and cons to programming on any platform.
* Windows has good commercial tools, but MFC, I/O and the memory problems associated with windows are enough to make one look for an alternative. The public domain tools available for Windows are either buggy as hell or don't even begin to understand the meaning of "robust".
* Mac has an interesting (yet similar paradigm to Windows) philosophy when it comes to GUIs or graphical resources. They're still using the old development tools (with the exception of Code Warrior) of yesterday to write apps. In the Mac world, YOU USE CODE WARRIOR - there's just no other way around it, but in a way, this actually a good thing. If you grab some mac code off the web, you're almost guarenteed it'll compile and work! The legacy stuff makes IPC and GUI development very "hacky".
* UNIX (in general) is interesting because you have several choices of APIs to use. Want to write a GUI? You can choose from a number of different GUI APIs! Motif, Tcl/tk, Gtk, Qt, and so on... It's even possible to mix-up the APIs, so you can have one app that has both Motif, Gtk and Qt all used together and using the same event handler! UNIX has some really poor GUI-builders (none of the PD ones I'd recommend), but it's not that tough to throw together a GUI using vi and your own 10 digits.
Some of the previous comments I also agree with, like the ability to treat devices as files under Linux - sound is simple, framebuffers are simple, tcp/ip is simple - it's all very low-level as opposed to the MFC where you have to instantiate a huge object and dig down inside of it to turn on the thing that you want. Unless you've done this for years, the MFC is a real pain in the ass to do anything very productive with.
That's just my $0.02
- Steve -- Steven Webb System Administrator II - Juneau and TECOM projects NCAR - Research Applications Program
Any kid can write tcl/tk stuff (it's like basic or perl) - it's straightforward and you can make complex GUIs with it. You can port it to/from linux/mac/windows and the kids can add-on code from other languages when they learn them. It's the ultimate for learning how to program. Procedures and stuff are not necessary, but possible. Event handling and graphics and GUI stuff is all built-in and easy to implement.
Start at: http://www.tcltk.com and maybe buy him/her a book or two.
Tcl/tk isn't all that good for production-quality applications (although it's getting better all the time), but it's fantastic for whipping something out in a hurry and can is very capable. I think that the windows version of tcl/tk even does win32+ registry manipulation now too, but that part isn't portable to any other platforms of course.
- Steve (ex-tcl/tk programmer) -- Steven Webb System Administrator II - Juneau and TECOM projects NCAR - Research Applications Program
Slashdot Mirror
Mirror here - let's see if my new DSL can keep up with a good slashdotting.
1.) Extra power cables (or 2 extras) - one for work, one for home and one to take with you
2.) Extra batteries - My Dell precision has a place for a second battery - I have 3 and I can travel on a 8 hour plane trip and still have enough juice for playing 3D games or watching movies for the whole trip!
3.) 802.11x card if it's not internal already
4.) USB 2.0 card if it's not internal already
5.) USB infrared mouse - I hate the touchpad. You cna't play games with a touchpad!!!
6.) A keyboard light (think geek has a cheap USB one) if you don't want to turn on the room light and keep everyone up - also good if people are watching TV in a dark room and you need to type.
7.) Good, but cheap foldable headphones. You want something that you can pack with you on a trip, so you can watch movies or play games on the plane - I bought a pair of sony headphones for like $10 and it's REALLY worth it! I hate earbuds, so I got normal headphones that are foldable.
What NOT to buy:
* Don't get the APC "Power case" with th universal adapter. I plugged it into a car charger and it TOTALLY FRIED my old computer's ability to recharge batteries. Bad, Bad, Bad, !!! After I used up all of my batteries (copying all my work off the machine) I had a worthless hunk of plastic and silicon - and APC didn't do a thing about it.
What ISP does he use for wireless/microwave? Is it Mesa Networks? I've tried to get Mesa Networks in my area north of Denver (Longmont) and it's not available.
I've seen this before, but never actually done it:
...). I've seen this done before but don't ask me how to do it.
Set up a linux machine as an application server and have the machine basicially do a diskless boot from the linux partition (read only). Then, have a disk on the actual machine that they can write to (save game files, etc
Anyway, that way, you're sure that every time the kid boots the machine, he/she is getting a clean OS and they can save their data to their own disk and not interfere with the other users or the OS.
You should be using a VPN if you have two offices and two firewalls. Unless your debian machines ARE your firewalls, then NFS or samba would be fine. However, machines will still lock or be slow of the internet gets slow or you drop a connection from one place to another.
I'm in Longmont and I've been searching the night skies all night. I'm bummed that it happened at 4pm. Does BALL have any footage online of the test?
Linus developed the Linux kernel to provide a free unix alternative to the masses. The FSF (GNU) people headed by R. Stallman are HUGE proponents of free software. These two people (and groups) are the people who brought Linux up as a child.
Redhat stood on the shoulders of giants and prettied-up the whole thing and offered commercial support for the product. Now they're cutting the cord with the open source community - throwing all of their crap into an O.S. project (Fedora) and putting all of their effort into the new RHEL.
Q: Don't you feel that you've just shot yourself in the foot? You're going against the community - and the community has made RH what it is today!
You should be ashamed of yourself and Stallman and Linus should never return any of your emails or calls.
The Linux Hardware Database doesn't exist anymore - it used to be owned by ZDNET, but they nuked the whole site a while ago. I sent in an e-mail to the tech department and requested that they ressurect the site, but there has been no action. The site is for the most part dead.
Still a very cool game and still very challenging! Dual-joysticks and smart bombs, what else do I have to say? 8)
Get yourself a HotRod joystick and the mame emulator and it'll be like you never left the 80's!
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I've gotten linux working with amanda and a scsi tape changer just fine. The tape changer stuff is here: http://bytesex.org/changer.html
Works like a charm on like 5 tape changers that I admin.
Pine has had threadding for a couple of years, but not configurable threadded display modes. You can even make it look like mutt's threads (there's an option for that now) if you want, so you don't have to deal with the ancient elm-like commands that mutt had. 8)
The whole article is BS. I just ripped the CD the other night for my fiance'. She wanted one of the songs off it for our wedding and our DJ only allows MP3s, so I used the "real player" under Win2k on an Inspiron 3700 and ripped the whole thing. I didn't play it, but I assume that this protection is meant to foil the copying, not the playing, right, so obviously it doesn't work. The article is BS.
Try the Archos jukebox recorder It has a 6 Gig drive in it, batteries last for ~10 hours, records directly to mp3. Has USB and works with linux. What more could you want? There's also a 20 Gig version. Url here
Just one of the standard interview questions, I guess, but I personally would like to see Microsoft working on their "Quality" as opposed to the "Quantity" of software. I wouldn't hate MS so much if I couldn't easily slam their products like I can now. Microsoft OSs don't have good uptimes. Microsoft products have security issues out the wazoo. Microsoft has their hands in everyone's pockets, but they're not trustworthy (as far as quality software goes).
Q: Where do you see Microsoft in 5 years?
Q: What will you change about Microsoft if you were CEO?
Just get like 200 e-mail addresses and back up your stuff to some online backup service that gives you a free 200 megs of free diskspace or whatever. Sure, you'll saturate your internet connection, but what the hey, it's your data, right? 8)
Classes can get you down because the end result is usually lame. The way to get around boredom if you like programming is to find an interesting project. I've worked in the Air traffic control industry and I'm writing games in my spare time to keep my hand in something that I enjoy writing. My daily job is boring as hell, but I still love programming because I keep myself doing interesting things with it. CS isn't boring, just some of the projects are ...
I'm a linux sysadmin and I use PGP to encrypt root passwords when I change them on some Army machines that I remotely admin. The weird thing was that the Army personel (at 6 different sites around the US) didn't know how to even USE PGP when I sent them things. I had to hold their hands over the phone and show them how to decrypt the information.
It seems to me that only people who REQUIRE encryption (terrorists, and your basic bad guys) and highly-technical people (anyone reading this e-mail) even bothers to encrypt their e-mail or their data (not counting commercial SSL in web browsers, since that's automatic). Shouldn't our government FORCE all of their communications to be encrypted and give all military personel training in this sort of thing? I'm sure that the bad guys (whomever they are) are all sitting around a table learning how to encrypt data, but in our country it seems that even the people who SHOULD be encrypting their data don't even know how to.
Just an observation.
I was browsing around on freshmeat yesterday and found a utility to e-mail infected hosts - it's called codeblue and the URL is here. It scans apache logs and e-mails the infected host with the info.
I was at Siggraph and I thought that it was rendering at higher than 2.5 FPS - it looked more like 5 or 6 FPS, but I could've been wrong. I snapped a photo of it. It can be found here
I never learned java - I always was waiting for it to become more stable and/or faster and more "native" - I stayed with C, C++, Perl and pretty much everything else, while my other programmer-buddies all gravitated towards java without any questions. Since then, I've become a sysadmin and I know that java is very fragmented already and will just continue to become more so. I know that this is a totally religous argument, so I won't go on an on about why one language is better than others, but most programmers, once they learn java, use it for everything no matter what the problem or task at hand and I think that's just ignorant - there's always a "best" tool for every job and java isn't it in a lot of cases.
...): java sucks.
Here's a link that I found to be particularly elightening, although a little out of date, check it out: Things that suck about JAVA (not written by me).
Here's the rant by Jamie Zawinski (author of xscreensaver, xkeycaps, among many other linux greats,
See, it's not just me!
--
Steven Webb
System Administrator II - Juneau and TECOM projects
NCAR - Research Applications Program
Most of the Ask Slashdot columns can be answered by epinions.com.
l l
Try here: http://www.epinions.com/elec-Comm-Mobileservice-A
--
Steven Webb
System Administrator II - Juneau and TECOM projects
NCAR - Research Applications Program
Go to: iwantspam.com and register.
--
Steven Webb
System Administrator II - Juneau and TECOM projects
NCAR - Research Applications Program
I started as an Amiga guy, then switched to Windows, then to Linux. A few years ago, I had to write an app that I had to port to Windows and Mac, so I have programming experience in most "flavors" of the major OSs of today.
... It's even possible to mix-up the APIs, so you can have one app that has both Motif, Gtk and Qt all used together and using the same event handler! UNIX has some really poor GUI-builders (none of the PD ones I'd recommend), but it's not that tough to throw together a GUI using vi and your own 10 digits.
In short, there are pros and cons to programming on any platform.
* Windows has good commercial tools, but MFC, I/O and the memory problems associated with windows are enough to make one look for an alternative. The public domain tools available for Windows are either buggy as hell or don't even begin to understand the meaning of "robust".
* Mac has an interesting (yet similar paradigm to Windows) philosophy when it comes to GUIs or graphical resources. They're still using the old development tools (with the exception of Code Warrior) of yesterday to write apps. In the Mac world, YOU USE CODE WARRIOR - there's just no other way around it, but in a way, this actually a good thing. If you grab some mac code off the web, you're almost guarenteed it'll compile and work! The legacy stuff makes IPC and GUI development very "hacky".
* UNIX (in general) is interesting because you have several choices of APIs to use. Want to write a GUI? You can choose from a number of different GUI APIs! Motif, Tcl/tk, Gtk, Qt, and so on
Some of the previous comments I also agree with, like the ability to treat devices as files under Linux - sound is simple, framebuffers are simple, tcp/ip is simple - it's all very low-level as opposed to the MFC where you have to instantiate a huge object and dig down inside of it to turn on the thing that you want. Unless you've done this for years, the MFC is a real pain in the ass to do anything very productive with.
That's just my $0.02
- Steve
--
Steven Webb
System Administrator II - Juneau and TECOM projects
NCAR - Research Applications Program
Any kid can write tcl/tk stuff (it's like basic or perl) - it's straightforward and you can make complex GUIs with it. You can port it to/from linux/mac/windows and the kids can add-on code from other languages when they learn them. It's the ultimate for learning how to program. Procedures and stuff are not necessary, but possible. Event handling and graphics and GUI stuff is all built-in and easy to implement.
Start at: http://www.tcltk.com and maybe buy him/her a book or two.
Tcl/tk isn't all that good for production-quality applications (although it's getting better all the time), but it's fantastic for whipping something out in a hurry and can is very capable. I think that the windows version of tcl/tk even does win32+ registry manipulation now too, but that part isn't portable to any other platforms of course.
- Steve (ex-tcl/tk programmer)
--
Steven Webb
System Administrator II - Juneau and TECOM projects
NCAR - Research Applications Program