Along with other/. recommendations, I suggest the user install a Unix toolkit on his Windows workstation at work. Then he can experiment with Unix/Linux tools in a "friendly" environment as well as compare them to Windows commands.
In particular, I suggest the user becomes familiar with the vi editor, as it will be required for many tasks, and is the most difficult of the basic sysadmin skills to master.
In 4-1/2 years of college, including numerous rugby parties and road trips, I never had anything expensive stolen from me. I had plenty of hi-fi gear, albums, tools, TV, Burmese Python, etc. all of which was potentially valuable. However, I once had all of my jeans stolen from the laundromat. Since my wardrobe pretty much consisted of jeans (it was the middle of winter), I was hosed. Because I lived paycheck to paycheck (still am!!!) and habitually squandered my earnings (still do!!!), it was a tough month or two.
Moral of the story: Don't forget about the little things, as they become valuable once they are gone.
So... last Saturday when I helped sheetrock a mentally handicapped woman's tiny studio apartment, I guess I was discouraging self-responsibility? I guess she should have had more responsibility than to have caught meningitis when she was an infant. At the very least, she should have had the responsibility to have chosen parents who could afford to take care of her for the rest of her life. Likewise, my son with cerebral palsy should have taken more personal responsibility over the development of his brain during the first trimester of his pre-natal growth. I plan on taking care of my son for the rest of his life, although it was a little iffy when I was so irresponsible as to get testicular cancer when I was 33 years old.
When I worked for a large corporation just out of college, they encouraged voluntary contributions to the United Way. They also encouraged giving blood on a regular basis. I learned from those examples, and continue on my own to this day, even though my current company does not encourage any sort of civic responsibility.
The thing that seperates us from the jungle is that we have moved beyond pure "survival of the fittest". While I personally would do just fine in the jungle, I would rather live in a civilized and compassionate (there's that word again) society where everyone has a chance to survive, regardless of their circumstances.
Get off the talk radio and give a little back to a society that has obviously given you far more than you have put in.
My son runs in Special Olympics, and yes, he is both physically and mentally handicapped. However, based on your sig, you appear to be profoundly socially handicapped. Crawl back under your rock and keep up the masturbation. You should avoid procreation at all costs.
Have you ever noticed that the Fox ticker runs a little slower than the other news networks. The Fox ticker also tends to use less complicated verbage. Of course this should not be misconstrued to imply anything negative about Fox's news audience.
It would be interesting to see if the Simpsons ticker runs faster or slower than the Fox news ticker. Maybe Fox could increase the Simpsons market share by creating a remedial Simpsons to run along side the regular Simpsons. Homer would be renamed Bubba and Marge would drive a pickup.
Before anyone starts picking on me for being an elitist Yankee, just know that I'm a registered Republican, I moved to Flori-duh from small-town Georgia, and yes, I drove pickups (72 and 76 Ford F100s). Now I drive a big honkin SUV. Even I can see that Fox News is Fairly Imbalanced.
All you privacy advocates can flame away. I'm going home and won't be taking the time to read your bitter diatribes anyhow.
As a parent of three children, including a handicapped son who just entered a large over-crowded highschool, I'm all for knowing where my kids are. As long as I'm responsible for my children, I welcome technology to assist me (and those who have proxy responsibility for my children) in tracking them. Once my children are adults, they should have every right to their privacy. Until then, I want to know every detail of my children's day.
I skipped high school on an almost daily basis. When I wasn't in school, I was driving around with my friends drinking beer and smoking rope. I will gladly invade my children's privacy if I can keep them from wasting their youth as I did (even though it was quite a fun youth!).
If this technology can improve the security of schools while at the same time freeing up teachers to actually teach, then that's a good thing. How cool would it be to get an automated email if one of my kids was frequently tardy to class. How critical would it be to get an instant automated notification that an elementary school student didn't arrive at school or a high school student left early.
My children's safety and education are much more critical to me than their privacy.
My wife tried to send two packages via UPS ground yesterday. She was quoted $13. She went down the road to USPS and sent them for $5. However, if I needed to get the packages sent overnight, I would have chosen UPS. If my wife was ideologically impaired, she would have only gone to UPS or she would have only gone to the USPS. However, as the original poster indicated, she thought through the problem and came to a logical decision.
The USPS fills an important role that private enterpise would never fill, by providing service even in rural areas. Think about the crappy job private enterprise has done in providing broadband to rural areas. My father's farm didn't get electricity until after WWII when the Rural Electrification Authority showed up.
The problem is not regulation, deregulation, privatization, nationalization or any of the surface reasons thrown about. The real problem is people who substitute ideology for thinking about a problem.
The free market is not the solution to every problem. Get over it.
The state is not the solution to every problem either. Get over it.
There are occasions when you have to use one strategy and occasions when you have to use another. Understanding that there are potential problems with a proposed change is essential if you are going to avoid them.
Instead what we get is politicians who use ideology as a substitute for thought.
This is the most lucid statement I have read on/. and far more lucid than anything I have heard/read on Fox, NPR, WSJ, etc.
Nice thought. I checked the website. It is nice to hear an alternate theory to terrorism. All the rednecks in my office are out buying ammo, just in case the solar flare theory doesn't pan out.
The SAC museum is a jewel lying in the middle of nowhere. There are two large hangars slap full of US and a few Soviet bombers and spy planes (SR-71). A third hangar is used to restore planes. There is a viewing platform where you can watch the restoration activity (or lack of activity). I have been to the Smithsonian and the Dayton museums. Both are more inspiring that the SAC museum, but it is still very impressive and has many more planes (that you can actually walk up and touch). The museum is very modern, clean, cheap, and pretty much empty. It is also right next to a state park with camping/lodging, just outside of Omaha.
Speaking of Omaha, they have a very nice zoo. Not a small-town zoo, but one of the best zoos in the US. I live in Florida, and have no family/affiliation with Nebraska/Omaha, so I'm speaking as a visitor, not a native.
I second this. The Apollo display is geek ga ga. An entire Saturn 5 rocket with moon orbiter payload laying on it's side inside a display hall, along with all sorts of exhibits regarding the Apollo project. They also have a bus tour of the various launch pads, etc.
While in Florida, the panhandle area has some of the best beaches in the US, along with a few state parks where you can camp. Grayton Beach state park is a good example. Pure white sand dunes and crystal clear azure water. Not much wave action unless a storm is in the gulf.
I spoke with a sales rep at NeTraverse yesterday. They are currently coding support for W2K/XP with release targeted for early next year. I am interested in this product because my small company has two apps (Quickbooks Pro and niche VB app) that aren't available on Linux. I would like to move our desktops to Linux. Win4Lin Terminal Server or a similar product might prove key in making that move. Pricing is $125 per concurrent user for the Terminal Server product. This would centralize my desktops on a couple of servers and allow me to go with diskless workstations, solving a number of my current management issues.
I used to work for a Fortune 500 company as a Unix sys admin. One of my projects was to assist in bringing a new Oracle financials system on line. The data on this system was so sensitive that only the executive board was given access, and then only via SecurID cards from specific locations during specific time windows.
Nightly backup tapes were queued in a fireproof walk-in vault before going offsite at the end of each day. I happened to be strolling by the vault one day and noticed the backup tapes sitting there on a shelf in the vault, right next to the open vault door. I did some checking and found out that the vault was left open during business hours so that the operations folks had easy access to backup media. The vault was in a different department than I/S, on a main hallway, right near the front door of the building. Obviously, I mentioned this to the Operations Manager. The new policy limited access to only a couple of operations supervisors, and instituted a media checkout policy (nothing a little social engineering couldn't thwart, but far better than the previous situation).
So what's the moral of the story? Make sure your security policy deals with backup media. Don't just assume that your operations department (or the offsite storage provider) is securely managing your media.
This book was a Pultizer winner in 1988 for general non-fiction. I read it in the early 90's and enjoyed it. It is somewhat technical, but no so technical that the reader requires a degree in physics to enjoy it. It also covers the moral and political issues facing those involved with developing the bomb. Anyone interested in the history of the first half of the twentieth century will get value out of this book.
I voted in central FL this morning on our new touch screen systems with no problem. Much better than the punchcard system we previously used.
However, as with almost everyone else on/., I would have rather seen an open-source system. I even submitted a letter to my local newspaper arguing for open-source. It was never published, and I don't recall any mention of open-source in the mainstream debates surrounding the switch to touchscreen systems.
More important, I would have like to have seen these expensive voting systems utilized for more than occasional elections. I believe Florida should have looked for a dual-use system that could have also been used in my kid's schools for testing. The annual FCAT test that virtually all Florida's public school students are required to take is a great example. Florida spends millions each year to have an independent company evaluate/score the FCAT tests. This could have been completed in-house with the correct equipment, saving those millions for more meaningful use within our education system. In addition, computerized testing would allow quicker, more accurate results, less cheating, and much less late-night work by teachers.
As for those who continue to bash Florida's voters for the 2000 election fiasco, some of it is deserved. On the other hand, Bush's margin of victory was much less than the margin of error in the Florida's polling system. If this was a 100 meter race, Bush would have won by less than an inch. Even a photo finish system would have trouble with such a close race. The reason that Florida is the butt of everyone's jokes is because Florida's 25 electoral votes were more important than all of the other closely contested states combined (Wisconsin/New Mexico/Oregon). This fiasco could have happened in any state of the union. Otherwise, why has almost every state re-evaluated and in some cases, overhauled their existing election systems.
When designing new systems, I ask the customer to break down the costs of an outage based on scope and time. For example, if the entire system goes down for a minute, what is the cost? An hour? A day? What if only part of the system goes down? I ask the customer to consider all impacts of the outage, beyond simple lack of access. I ask them to put all of this information into a spreadsheet so they can easily play with the numbers and do what-ifs. Most of the time, the customer doesn't have a clue what an outage costs them until they perform this exercise.
Once the customer truly understands the actual costs of an outage, they are generally much more realistic when it comes to designing a system. I also encourage the customer to consider the odds of an outage happening. Yes, total and extended system outages occur. I have more than enough first-hand experiences. But what is the cost and what are the odds over time? Is it worth paying an extra $100k to avoid an outage that may only happen once a year and result in a $10k worst-case scenario?
As for the several of the comments I observed about planes requiring five-nines uptime, I don't think that is realistic. Planes frequently have system failures resulting in partial outages. That's why they have two engines, multiple wheels, back-up control systems, etc. Also, most of us have experienced flight delays due to mechanincal repairs. That's an outage as far as I'm concerned. When a plane can remain in service constantly for all but a few seconds a year, then it will have achieved five-nines. I don't know of any planes that perform to that level.
Slashdot Mirror
Along with other /. recommendations, I suggest the user install a Unix toolkit on his Windows workstation at work. Then he can experiment with Unix/Linux tools in a "friendly" environment as well as compare them to Windows commands.
In particular, I suggest the user becomes familiar with the vi editor, as it will be required for many tasks, and is the most difficult of the basic sysadmin skills to master.
In 4-1/2 years of college, including numerous rugby parties and road trips, I never had anything expensive stolen from me. I had plenty of hi-fi gear, albums, tools, TV, Burmese Python, etc. all of which was potentially valuable. However, I once had all of my jeans stolen from the laundromat. Since my wardrobe pretty much consisted of jeans (it was the middle of winter), I was hosed. Because I lived paycheck to paycheck (still am!!!) and habitually squandered my earnings (still do!!!), it was a tough month or two.
Moral of the story: Don't forget about the little things, as they become valuable once they are gone.
So... last Saturday when I helped sheetrock a mentally handicapped woman's tiny studio apartment, I guess I was discouraging self-responsibility? I guess she should have had more responsibility than to have caught meningitis when she was an infant. At the very least, she should have had the responsibility to have chosen parents who could afford to take care of her for the rest of her life. Likewise, my son with cerebral palsy should have taken more personal responsibility over the development of his brain during the first trimester of his pre-natal growth. I plan on taking care of my son for the rest of his life, although it was a little iffy when I was so irresponsible as to get testicular cancer when I was 33 years old.
When I worked for a large corporation just out of college, they encouraged voluntary contributions to the United Way. They also encouraged giving blood on a regular basis. I learned from those examples, and continue on my own to this day, even though my current company does not encourage any sort of civic responsibility.
The thing that seperates us from the jungle is that we have moved beyond pure "survival of the fittest". While I personally would do just fine in the jungle, I would rather live in a civilized and compassionate (there's that word again) society where everyone has a chance to survive, regardless of their circumstances.
Get off the talk radio and give a little back to a society that has obviously given you far more than you have put in.
My son runs in Special Olympics, and yes, he is both physically and mentally handicapped. However, based on your sig, you appear to be profoundly socially handicapped. Crawl back under your rock and keep up the masturbation. You should avoid procreation at all costs.
Have you ever noticed that the Fox ticker runs a little slower than the other news networks. The Fox ticker also tends to use less complicated verbage. Of course this should not be misconstrued to imply anything negative about Fox's news audience.
It would be interesting to see if the Simpsons ticker runs faster or slower than the Fox news ticker. Maybe Fox could increase the Simpsons market share by creating a remedial Simpsons to run along side the regular Simpsons. Homer would be renamed Bubba and Marge would drive a pickup.
Before anyone starts picking on me for being an elitist Yankee, just know that I'm a registered Republican, I moved to Flori-duh from small-town Georgia, and yes, I drove pickups (72 and 76 Ford F100s). Now I drive a big honkin SUV. Even I can see that Fox News is Fairly Imbalanced.
All you privacy advocates can flame away. I'm going home and won't be taking the time to read your bitter diatribes anyhow.
As a parent of three children, including a handicapped son who just entered a large over-crowded highschool, I'm all for knowing where my kids are. As long as I'm responsible for my children, I welcome technology to assist me (and those who have proxy responsibility for my children) in tracking them. Once my children are adults, they should have every right to their privacy. Until then, I want to know every detail of my children's day.
I skipped high school on an almost daily basis. When I wasn't in school, I was driving around with my friends drinking beer and smoking rope. I will gladly invade my children's privacy if I can keep them from wasting their youth as I did (even though it was quite a fun youth!).
If this technology can improve the security of schools while at the same time freeing up teachers to actually teach, then that's a good thing. How cool would it be to get an automated email if one of my kids was frequently tardy to class. How critical would it be to get an instant automated notification that an elementary school student didn't arrive at school or a high school student left early.
My children's safety and education are much more critical to me than their privacy.
My wife tried to send two packages via UPS ground yesterday. She was quoted $13. She went down the road to USPS and sent them for $5. However, if I needed to get the packages sent overnight, I would have chosen UPS. If my wife was ideologically impaired, she would have only gone to UPS or she would have only gone to the USPS. However, as the original poster indicated, she thought through the problem and came to a logical decision.
The USPS fills an important role that private enterpise would never fill, by providing service even in rural areas. Think about the crappy job private enterprise has done in providing broadband to rural areas. My father's farm didn't get electricity until after WWII when the Rural Electrification Authority showed up.
The problem is not regulation, deregulation, privatization, nationalization or any of the surface reasons thrown about. The real problem is people who substitute ideology for thinking about a problem.
The free market is not the solution to every problem. Get over it.
The state is not the solution to every problem either. Get over it.
There are occasions when you have to use one strategy and occasions when you have to use another. Understanding that there are potential problems with a proposed change is essential if you are going to avoid them.
Instead what we get is politicians who use ideology as a substitute for thought.
This is the most lucid statement I have read on /. and far more lucid than anything I have heard/read on Fox, NPR, WSJ, etc.
Thanks for enlightening my morning.
Nice thought. I checked the website. It is nice to hear an alternate theory to terrorism. All the rednecks in my office are out buying ammo, just in case the solar flare theory doesn't pan out.
hmmmm
The SAC museum is a jewel lying in the middle of nowhere. There are two large hangars slap full of US and a few Soviet bombers and spy planes (SR-71). A third hangar is used to restore planes. There is a viewing platform where you can watch the restoration activity (or lack of activity). I have been to the Smithsonian and the Dayton museums. Both are more inspiring that the SAC museum, but it is still very impressive and has many more planes (that you can actually walk up and touch). The museum is very modern, clean, cheap, and pretty much empty. It is also right next to a state park with camping/lodging, just outside of Omaha.
Speaking of Omaha, they have a very nice zoo. Not a small-town zoo, but one of the best zoos in the US. I live in Florida, and have no family/affiliation with Nebraska/Omaha, so I'm speaking as a visitor, not a native.
I second this. The Apollo display is geek ga ga. An entire Saturn 5 rocket with moon orbiter payload laying on it's side inside a display hall, along with all sorts of exhibits regarding the Apollo project. They also have a bus tour of the various launch pads, etc.
While in Florida, the panhandle area has some of the best beaches in the US, along with a few state parks where you can camp. Grayton Beach state park is a good example. Pure white sand dunes and crystal clear azure water. Not much wave action unless a storm is in the gulf.
I spoke with a sales rep at NeTraverse yesterday. They are currently coding support for W2K/XP with release targeted for early next year. I am interested in this product because my small company has two apps (Quickbooks Pro and niche VB app) that aren't available on Linux. I would like to move our desktops to Linux. Win4Lin Terminal Server or a similar product might prove key in making that move. Pricing is $125 per concurrent user for the Terminal Server product. This would centralize my desktops on a couple of servers and allow me to go with diskless workstations, solving a number of my current management issues.
Any thoughts on how this will affect business-to-business telemarketing?
Our company brokers electronic components and does some cold calling to buyers at OEMs.
Has anyone reviewed the legislation to see if a business could add their numbers to the do-not-call list?
I used to work for a Fortune 500 company as a Unix sys admin. One of my projects was to assist in bringing a new Oracle financials system on line. The data on this system was so sensitive that only the executive board was given access, and then only via SecurID cards from specific locations during specific time windows.
Nightly backup tapes were queued in a fireproof walk-in vault before going offsite at the end of each day. I happened to be strolling by the vault one day and noticed the backup tapes sitting there on a shelf in the vault, right next to the open vault door. I did some checking and found out that the vault was left open during business hours so that the operations folks had easy access to backup media. The vault was in a different department than I/S, on a main hallway, right near the front door of the building. Obviously, I mentioned this to the Operations Manager. The new policy limited access to only a couple of operations supervisors, and instituted a media checkout policy (nothing a little social engineering couldn't thwart, but far better than the previous situation).
So what's the moral of the story? Make sure your security policy deals with backup media. Don't just assume that your operations department (or the offsite storage provider) is securely managing your media.
This book was a Pultizer winner in 1988 for general non-fiction. I read it in the early 90's and enjoyed it. It is somewhat technical, but no so technical that the reader requires a degree in physics to enjoy it. It also covers the moral and political issues facing those involved with developing the bomb. Anyone interested in the history of the first half of the twentieth century will get value out of this book.
I voted in central FL this morning on our new touch screen systems with no problem. Much better than the punchcard system we previously used.
/., I would have rather seen an open-source system. I even submitted a letter to my local newspaper arguing for open-source. It was never published, and I don't recall any mention of open-source in the mainstream debates surrounding the switch to touchscreen systems.
However, as with almost everyone else on
More important, I would have like to have seen these expensive voting systems utilized for more than occasional elections. I believe Florida should have looked for a dual-use system that could have also been used in my kid's schools for testing. The annual FCAT test that virtually all Florida's public school students are required to take is a great example. Florida spends millions each year to have an independent company evaluate/score the FCAT tests. This could have been completed in-house with the correct equipment, saving those millions for more meaningful use within our education system. In addition, computerized testing would allow quicker, more accurate results, less cheating, and much less late-night work by teachers.
As for those who continue to bash Florida's voters for the 2000 election fiasco, some of it is deserved. On the other hand, Bush's margin of victory was much less than the margin of error in the Florida's polling system. If this was a 100 meter race, Bush would have won by less than an inch. Even a photo finish system would have trouble with such a close race. The reason that Florida is the butt of everyone's jokes is because Florida's 25 electoral votes were more important than all of the other closely contested states combined (Wisconsin/New Mexico/Oregon). This fiasco could have happened in any state of the union. Otherwise, why has almost every state re-evaluated and in some cases, overhauled their existing election systems.
When designing new systems, I ask the customer to break down the costs of an outage based on scope and time. For example, if the entire system goes down for a minute, what is the cost? An hour? A day? What if only part of the system goes down? I ask the customer to consider all impacts of the outage, beyond simple lack of access. I ask them to put all of this information into a spreadsheet so they can easily play with the numbers and do what-ifs. Most of the time, the customer doesn't have a clue what an outage costs them until they perform this exercise.
Once the customer truly understands the actual costs of an outage, they are generally much more realistic when it comes to designing a system. I also encourage the customer to consider the odds of an outage happening. Yes, total and extended system outages occur. I have more than enough first-hand experiences. But what is the cost and what are the odds over time? Is it worth paying an extra $100k to avoid an outage that may only happen once a year and result in a $10k worst-case scenario?
As for the several of the comments I observed about planes requiring five-nines uptime, I don't think that is realistic. Planes frequently have system failures resulting in partial outages. That's why they have two engines, multiple wheels, back-up control systems, etc. Also, most of us have experienced flight delays due to mechanincal repairs. That's an outage as far as I'm concerned. When a plane can remain in service constantly for all but a few seconds a year, then it will have achieved five-nines. I don't know of any planes that perform to that level.