When things started getting tight around there as the dot-com pyramid scheme imploded, one of the first departments to go was Abuse, as far as I could tell. At least my then-employer, an Exodus subsidiary, could e-mail them without response. This happened about the same time that spam coming out of Exodus IP space (which had previously been pretty clean) started increasing exponentially. Coincidence? I think not.
I also remember one day when the former CEO of Exodus publicly stated that Exodus did not host porn. On the day that statement was made, I knew for a fact that it was false. We were not only hosting pr0n, some of those sites were spamming, which is how they crossed my radar in the first place. I'll give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that she just didn't know the kind of people the sales department was bringing in when the going got tough; I don't think she lied. However, it wasn't a good thing to say without checking it's veracity first. Obviously, no sysadmin or network engineer was asked; any of us could have told her that Exodus was hosting porn by then.
I think that swallows would be the most effective retrieval mechanism after the initial bounce. Two of them could catch it on a string and carry it, you see...
I can't believe no one has suggested this already, but the training course(s) you should take are the one(s) that teach the distro to which your company will migrate.
If that distro will be Red Hat, I would suggest Red Hat courses. If it is something else, you might want to take a look at the LPI certification series (http://www.lpi.org/en/home.html). You'll learn quite a bit in those classes, and they are (somewhat) distro-neutral.
I haven't looked at O'Reilly's classes (like many others here, I'm self-taught), but O'Reilly has a well-deserved reputation for quality reference materials. No publisher is as well-represented as O'Reilly on the shelves of *nix professionals. There are eleven books on my office bookshelf, and eight of them are O'Reilly titles. I have a bunch more at home. When I buy a book at work, if it's O'Reilly I usually pay for it b/c I want to keep it. If it's not, I usually expense it and the company can keep it. I guess what I'm trying to say is, the O'Reilly course is unlikely to suck:-)
If your company has asked you to also choose the distro, then that's another kettle of fish entirely. I won't make a recommendation on that because I don't know enough about your company's needs and capabilities. If you have to choose the distro, please post info on that. I do have a favorite distro, but I won't mention it now; it might not be well-suited for your company's needs, and I could not in good conscience recommend it without more information. Lots of people have beat the drums for their favorite, and some of their arguments are ones that, in general I agree with. However, without knowing what distro your company will use, I think telling you "Set up a learning network with (insert my favorite distro here)" is just giving unfounded advice.
Re:Ok, I'll bite...
on
Dive Into Python
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Maybe its more of a troll than flamebait, but I'll bite too:-)
While that's not entirely true( supporters of Free and Open Source Software do become managers a lot more often than some people might think), there is something else they do quite a lot: they become entrepreneurs.
I'm a believer in Free software, and while I'm more likely to become a manager than an entrepreneur (I'm already on the ladder), I do hope to become an entrepreneur one day. Not necessarily in IT; I'd like run a nice little coffeehouse bookstore with great connectivity, a great selection of technical books, live acoustic blues and other "real" music, and espresso that'll make your hair stand up for a week:-)
My wife owns her own business, so I've gotten a good look at the ups and downs of being a small business owner, and I've got to say that it still looks like something I'd like to do.
In conclusion, I'll just state that the GP says "[they] do not become managers" like that's a bad thing:-) And of course, I'll bet that he's not a manager either and won't become one with such narrow thinking.
I know I shouldn't feed trolls, but it's like this:
1) The system needed to be upgraded, badly. The SGI gear was old and collapsing under the load we were putting on it. Like most sysadmins, we didn't much care for being paged in the middle of the night. There was no question that it was time for a forklift upgrade;
2) SGI gear is, as I'm sure you're aware, extremely expensive, and in those days was probably relatively more expensive than it is now. Even IRIX licenses were quite costly in those days; probably still are;
3) A single dual-Pentium III 600 box was faster than all four of our SGI boxes put together, and a fraction of the cost.
It's what's called a business case. Perhaps you've heard of it? Or will when you get into high school.
In short, we would have been nuts to keep running that obsolete SGI kit and our customers would have killed us. Well, they would have voted with their feet, and some of them did before we could get the stuff retired. All were happy when it was gone. We just stuck it all in the store room until the lease expired. Do you know what happened then? We called the leasing company to pick it up, and they said they didn't even want it, we could keep it b/c it was too old to re-lease and wasn't worth their time to sell. We gave it away to staff who wanted an IRIX box at home. It was usable enough for that.
And you do you know how it all turned out? The Debian systems will not only much faster and much cheaper (not to mention rack-mountable) than the SGI kit they replaced, they were also far more reliable. No more middle-of-the-night pages.
Best UNIX ever created? You must have stock in SGI:-)
I'm not saying that IRIX is bad, but I'd rather have Solaris, and I'd rather have (for most applications; there are some where the task would dictate Solaris) Linux or FreeBSD than either of them.
WE are not writing of the greatest *nix ever invented. I am:-) You're writing of IRIX.
So you think I should be beaten for being smarter than you, hmmm? Mighty big talk from someone who doesn't dare post logged in. I'd offer to meet you somewhere, but you'd probably have to get your mom to drive you to the fight.
I also worked at an ISP that ran its mail system on IRIX and migrated it to Debian, and our experience was nothing at all like yours. While I no longer work there, they are still running Debian and to the best of my knowledge (which is pretty good; I still keep in touch), they have delivered 100% mail system uptime since migrating to Debian, something we were not able to do with our SGI boxen.
Partly on the basis of that experience, I moved from running RH on my workstation to running Debian, and I've never been sorry about that, either.
Our migration from IRIX to Debian was a complete success because of two things:
1) We had, collectively, a lot of talent on Linux; 2) The sysadmin put in charge of the project had a lot of talent and experience on Debian; the rest of us had most of our experience in Solaris, BSD, and Red Hat. The IRIX guy had moved to another department by then.
What was the difference? Not lack of talent, I think. It sounds like you know what you are doing. Perhaps a matter of choosing appropriate hardware, though. We didn't screw around with ATA RAID (this was in the pre-SATA days, but that wouldn't have mattered) or anything that was less than server grade. This was a mission-critical system, and we used only server-grade hardware that was known to be very well supported.
The hosts we used were six dual-CPU rackmount cases running SCSI disks (RAID 1) for the OS install, and all the important stuff was on SAN (RAID 5 there).
Everything was absolutely bulletproof. How bulletproof? We installed Woody, with the 2.2 kernel (this was the late 1990s, and 2.4 was still experiencing some growing pains) and it worked perfectly right out of the box.
As I noted at the top, they are still at 100% mail system uptime to this day, to the best of my (fairly good) knowledge. They are still running Debian Stable.
Many other people can tell you stories just like this. Debian most certainly has a place in a shop that needs to get things done, a place that can perhaps only be taken by FreeBSD (with the possible exception of Slackware, Debian Stable is the only Linux distro I've ever used that can match FreeBSD for stability, or at least come very close).
I'm not saying you don't know what you're doing, I'm sure you do. You're probably a better sysadmin than I am. However, I do see one thing that you did wrong. You chose (or perhaps the customer's budget chose for you) what some people would call "toy hardware." Debian Stable often isn't the best fit on the block with that stuff. But if you had been using a proper server box with SCSI (or at the least parallel ATA; I *still* don't like SATA support under Linux much), I think it would have been all right.
One other thing I would have done differently is this: as soon as I found that I had problems with the hardware and the distro I had chosen, one or the other would have been jettisoned. For a server application, it would have been the hardware if I had the latitude to make that decision. Even today, a server you need to depend on should use SCSI disks (I'm still partial to Adaptec adapters) and known top-quality parts.
With all due respect, while building an identical machine in your lab was the smart way to do it, investing hundreds of hours into making Debian work with that hardware was not. It would have been cheaper to *buy* a proper box and just *give* it to the customer. Alternatively, if that hardware was cast in concrete, early on you should have chosen a different distro, one that is focused on a single hardware platform and that places more emphasis on supporting the bleeding edge than on rock-solid stability for tried and true equipment. Debian is not that distro (not to say it doesn't work fine on most stuff; I install Debian Sid on Frys' sale-quality hardware regularly without incident).
I would advance the idea that Frys sale-quality hardware (such as SATA-RAID) has no place in a shop that needs to get things done. You probably won't ex
I'm not aware of any backport to Sarge, so yes, pinning is what you need to read up on.
Alternatively, you could download the statically linked tarball from the Skype website and just use that, operating it completely outside of the packaging system.
Yet a third alternative is to grab an RPM, use alien to convert it to a.deb and install it using dpkg -i.
I don't plan to follow Sarge into stable because stable tends to be a bit, well, conservative for typical workstation use. However, I will probably follow Sid into testing after Sarge is promoted to Stable.
Problems with the new installer? Uh, yeah, a lot of us have had that, especially where software RAID is involved:-)
It was my understanding that Sabots were sub-caliber tungsten rounds that shed the outer carrier in flight, is that incorrect?
Thanks for the correction on the A-10 cannon.
Good point on Walmart. I live in the LA area, and there has been controversy (generated by activists who claim to have the community good at heart) over an attempt by Walmart to open a store in one of LA's poorer areas. This would generate a bunch of jobs in an area that has a serious unemployment problem, while simultaneous bringing decent, low-cost goods to an area that also has a poverty problem. The activists who opposed it apparently believe that it is better for a person who is poor and unemployed to have no job rather than a job at Walmart. Having been one or the other of those things at times in my life, I know from first-hand experience that they are wrong.
Funny how you don't see people griping about fast food restaurants, even though they pay less than Walmart and offer a lower quality product.
Ditto that. The reason I've never tried Netflix is b/c when I want to rent a movie, it's always spur-of-the-moment and I want it now. Not in a couple of days, now. And there's a Hollywood Video within walking distance of my apartment.
Not only is overlooked != censorship, at least some of them were probably overlooked on the basis of being factually inaccurate to the point of consituting a flat-out lie. For example:
"Most American weapons (missiles, smart bombs, dumb bombs, bullets, tank shells, cruise missiles, etc.) contain high amounts of radioactive uranium."
This is patently false. The *only* weapons that contain depleted uranium are some (but not all) anti-tank weapons. These included the 40 mm shells fired by the cannon on the A-10, and some anti-tank rounds fired by tanks (but again, not all. HEAT (High Explosive Anti-Tank) and sabot rounds do not contain depleted uranium).
No bullets contain depleted Uranium. Most tank shells do not. No missiles contain depleted uranium. Smart bombs do not contain depleted uranium. Bunker buster bombs do not contain depleted uranium. No dumb bombs contain depleted uranium.
Bullets are for use against personnel and non-armored vehicles. Even if there were enough DU available for use in bullets and it were not cost-prohibitive to make them, that would not be an effective use of DU.
Bombs, whether dumb or smart, are not anti-armor weapons, and in those instances that they are used on tanks, they depend upon their high-explosive capability. Bunker busters penetrate bunkers by being very large and heavy, with a thick, hardened casing filled with a lot of HE.
General-purpose air-to-surface missiles are all high-explosive, so are cruise missiles. A cruise missile that is carrying radioactive material isn't carrying DU; it's a nuke. Air-to-surface anti-tank missiles carry HEAT warheads. Surface-to-surface anti-tank missiles also carry HEAT warheads.
If the level of "journalism" (if I can call "making things up" journalism) in any of the other articles is anything like that one, it's pretty obvious why these articles were not picked up by the mainstream press. It's because they are blatant lies.
There is some griping about them not providing source, but hey, they are not under any particular obligation to do so.
That doesn't mean I don't think it would be great to have a free software Skype client; it would be great.
For that matter, it would be great to have *any* free software VoIP solution that worked well and was interoperable with other popular ones such as Yahoo Messenger or Dialpad (who has been doing the PC to PSTN gateway thing a lot longer than Skype). That isn't to say there aren't FOSS solutions that do one or the other of those things, but so far I have not encountered one that I considered to be doing both of those things: working well *and* being interoperable.
Doing VoIP well is hard, and trying to be interoperable with closed-source players, even if they are using H.323, is doubly so. However, I don't think the difficulty of it is the main problem. There just doesn't seem to be a great deal of interest among FOSS programmers at writing that sort of thing. We've got tons of text IM clients and at least one entire system (Jabber), but they don't do voice. There is one that does voice and is sort of compatible with Yahoo voice (can't recall the name right now, it's written in Python), but it fails the "works well" test.
For those who are really distressed by the lack of a *good* open source VoIP solution, whether or not it interoperates with any of the others, write one if it really bothers you that much. If you can't, throw some money at someone who can and will. Or throw some money at people who are already working on it, so they can devote more time to it. If you can't throw much money, start an organization of people to whom this matters enough to pay for open source development, and collectively throw money. If you do this, I will even contribute. I think it would be great to have free software that does this. Not so great that I'm willing to start such an organization myself (but then, I'm not complaining about the lack of source code for Skype, either), but great enough that I'd make a donation.
Sad but true. I sometimes tease my dad about all the stuff he prints out and saves in a hardcopy file, but someday he'll get to laugh at me when he's got some document I want that has disappeared off the web.
I guess the lesson here is that if there's a site with some documentation that is really important to us, we should wget as much of it as we need (or all of it, if we have the space), and just archive it. Since a lot of CD media doesn't seem too good on longevity, in some cases having it printed and bound is probably justified.
Usability expert? Why yes, I am. I know what actually works well, in the real world on a real desktop that I use for 12 hours or more a day. One of the things that most definitely doesn't work is something that forces me to put twice as much mileage on the mouse (not to mention having to take my eyes farther off of my work) as I would have to if the menu bars were more intelligently and intuitively placed. There's a reason why no one (AFAIK) but Apple does it that way, and I'll give you a hint: it's *not* because everyone else is wrong. If you can't see that, you're hardly in a position to criticize anyone else's expertise.
The real reason you're so worked up about this is because you are only trying to justify your own person preference and wrote the whole article with nothing but that goal, and now you're upset because someone sees right through it.
Is having the menu bar in the window better because it's my personal preference? Yes, absolutely. It makes it better for me, and that is the only thing that matters on my computer. No other thing and no other person matters on my computer.
Now, the fact that the great majority of people using Linux seem to prefer to have the menu bar in the window (or they wouldn't put it there) would tend to indicate that it's better for them, too. Now, if it's better for most people, then we could reasonably conclude that it's just plain better. I even know a number of Mac users who use and like Macs not because the menu bar is at the top, but in spite of that fact. That one big mistake isn't enough to take them away from an otherwise excellent platform.
I did learn a few things from your post(s) and article though. I learned that I not only know more about what actually works well in the real world than you do, and that I am most certainly politer and more well-adjusted than you, who are nothing but a troll dressing himself up in expert's clothing and trotting out the same stale article often enough that I recognized it on sight.
*plonk*
(You've probably heard that sound a lot before, but if not, get someone to explain it to you.)
Ah, yes, I've read that tro^H^H^H, uh, I mean, article before. I'm not the one with the credibility gap here. Putting the menu bar at the top of the screen severely reduces the utility of an otherwise not-bad interface.
Need empirical evidence? Both Gnome and KDE can do that, but you have to look a long time to find anyone who actually sets it that way and likes it.
You suggest I don't bother replying? What are you gonna do, troll me some more until I'm properly cowed? Sorry, it doesn't work. Climb back into your ivory tower before it turns into a pumpkin at midnight.
In Windows, the web browser and file browser are different programs. Is it not, then, Gnome that more closesly mimics Windows? Not that I like the Konqueror approach; I'd much prefer it be just a web browser. It's a good web browser, a poor file manager.
Either way, that doesn't really matter, though. You can make both KDE and Gnome look as much or as little like Windows as you care for.
Moreover, who really cares which GUI they emulate, or if they take a bit from both (which is what they in fact do)? I have a laundry list of complaints about Windows, but only one of them is about the GUI: that is natively only has one desktop. On my notebook I run eight, and on my desktop 10. That really lets me compartmentalize my work. (Yes, I know there are some solutions to do that on Windows, and I've tried them; however, I found them sufficiently unsatisfactory that I removed them again; happily, I have now secured leave from IT to partition my disk and install Linux, so that will no longer be an issue soon.)
The Windows GUI is not bad, really. In at least one respect (doesn't stick the menu bar at the top of the screen), it 's even better than Apple's.
No, the big problems with Windows are security, stability, performance, and the behavior of the company that makes it. Whether the last item belongs last or first, you can discuss amongst yourselves:-)
The article notes that the dinars were relatively difficult to counterfeit, so that serves as kind of a built-in enforcement mechanism. If the note is hard enough to counterfeit that people will be able to identify most counterfeits, then even without a government to bust the counterfeiters, there won't be a serious problem with counterfeiting.
Y'know, that's what I really love about Slashdot: "I disagree with you and I have mod points" = "You're a troll."
I get mod points pretty often, and I use them fairly (how unslashdot of me, I know) and if I think I can't make a fair moderation, I don't mod at all.
I also meta-moderate often and check the context of just about every meta-moderation, and I punish those who abuse their mod points. To the modertation troll who modded me troll, someone who does M2 like I do is out there and will get you.
Unfortunately it isn't applicable to your case, since this is a KDE application, but I believe Knoda, which works with MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and ODBC, and is scriptable with Python, sounds like it does much of what you need:
http://www.knoda.org/
It's a lot of work just to replace FileMaker (probably more work than upgrading, although you would get the desired SQL backend), but one possible option is to run X and KDE under OS X. I don't have a Mac and am not familiar with how well this would work (or not), so maybe you're sitting there right now and wondering what I'm on to suggest such a thing:-)
You're probably trolling, but just in case you're really that stupid...
Read the first half of what you wrote: 1 kg = 2.2 lbs.
Now, quick, what is 1 x 2.2? Could it... 2.2?
I hope this isn't too complicated, but let's go on to a more advanced example.
If 1 kg = 2.2 pounds, then 2 kg (and you can verify this with a scale if you can't do simple arithmetic) must weigh 4.4 pounds. And by some odd coincidence, 2 x 2.2 = 4.4.
Now, if you were to divide 1 by 2.2, you would get app. 0.45, which doesn't fit very well into the idea that to convert kilograms to pounds, you divide the kilogram figure by 2.2, since 1 kg most certainly does not equally app. 0.45 lbs.
What, indeed, is the world coming to when people (pick one):
A) Really can't do simple arithmetic anymore; B) Can't troll any better than claiming you divide kilograms by 2.2 to get pounds.
There was a flying one just a couple days ago outside of my office. Of course, the landing wasn't too smooth; it was on its roof and pointing 180 degrees from its previous direction of travel.
Slashdot Mirror
P.S. Things actually got *way* better around there after C&W bought Exodus. C&W is a company I would work for again.
Savvis is the Artist Formerly Known as Exodus.
When things started getting tight around there as the dot-com pyramid scheme imploded, one of the first departments to go was Abuse, as far as I could tell. At least my then-employer, an Exodus subsidiary, could e-mail them without response. This happened about the same time that spam coming out of Exodus IP space (which had previously been pretty clean) started increasing exponentially. Coincidence? I think not.
I also remember one day when the former CEO of Exodus publicly stated that Exodus did not host porn. On the day that statement was made, I knew for a fact that it was false. We were not only hosting pr0n, some of those sites were spamming, which is how they crossed my radar in the first place. I'll give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that she just didn't know the kind of people the sales department was bringing in when the going got tough; I don't think she lied. However, it wasn't a good thing to say without checking it's veracity first. Obviously, no sysadmin or network engineer was asked; any of us could have told her that Exodus was hosting porn by then.
I think that swallows would be the most effective retrieval mechanism after the initial bounce. Two of them could catch it on a string and carry it, you see...
I can't believe no one has suggested this already, but the training course(s) you should take are the one(s) that teach the distro to which your company will migrate.
:-)
If that distro will be Red Hat, I would suggest Red Hat courses. If it is something else, you might want to take a look at the LPI certification series (http://www.lpi.org/en/home.html). You'll learn quite a bit in those classes, and they are (somewhat) distro-neutral.
I haven't looked at O'Reilly's classes (like many others here, I'm self-taught), but O'Reilly has a well-deserved reputation for quality reference materials. No publisher is as well-represented as O'Reilly on the shelves of *nix professionals. There are eleven books on my office bookshelf, and eight of them are O'Reilly titles. I have a bunch more at home. When I buy a book at work, if it's O'Reilly I usually pay for it b/c I want to keep it. If it's not, I usually expense it and the company can keep it. I guess what I'm trying to say is, the O'Reilly course is unlikely to suck
If your company has asked you to also choose the distro, then that's another kettle of fish entirely. I won't make a recommendation on that because I don't know enough about your company's needs and capabilities. If you have to choose the distro, please post info on that. I do have a favorite distro, but I won't mention it now; it might not be well-suited for your company's needs, and I could not in good conscience recommend it without more information. Lots of people have beat the drums for their favorite, and some of their arguments are ones that, in general I agree with. However, without knowing what distro your company will use, I think telling you "Set up a learning network with (insert my favorite distro here)" is just giving unfounded advice.
Maybe its more of a troll than flamebait, but I'll bite too :-)
:-)
:-) And of course, I'll bet that he's not a manager either and won't become one with such narrow thinking.
While that's not entirely true( supporters of Free and Open Source Software do become managers a lot more often than some people might think), there is something else they do quite a lot: they become entrepreneurs.
I'm a believer in Free software, and while I'm more likely to become a manager than an entrepreneur (I'm already on the ladder), I do hope to become an entrepreneur one day. Not necessarily in IT; I'd like run a nice little coffeehouse bookstore with great connectivity, a great selection of technical books, live acoustic blues and other "real" music, and espresso that'll make your hair stand up for a week
My wife owns her own business, so I've gotten a good look at the ups and downs of being a small business owner, and I've got to say that it still looks like something I'd like to do.
In conclusion, I'll just state that the GP says "[they] do not become managers" like that's a bad thing
I know I shouldn't feed trolls, but it's like this:
:-)
:-) You're writing of IRIX.
1) The system needed to be upgraded, badly. The SGI gear was old and collapsing under the load we were putting on it. Like most sysadmins, we didn't much care for being paged in the middle of the night. There was no question that it was time for a forklift upgrade;
2) SGI gear is, as I'm sure you're aware, extremely expensive, and in those days was probably relatively more expensive than it is now. Even IRIX licenses were quite costly in those days; probably still are;
3) A single dual-Pentium III 600 box was faster than all four of our SGI boxes put together, and a fraction of the cost.
It's what's called a business case. Perhaps you've heard of it? Or will when you get into high school.
In short, we would have been nuts to keep running that obsolete SGI kit and our customers would have killed us. Well, they would have voted with their feet, and some of them did before we could get the stuff retired. All were happy when it was gone. We just stuck it all in the store room until the lease expired. Do you know what happened then? We called the leasing company to pick it up, and they said they didn't even want it, we could keep it b/c it was too old to re-lease and wasn't worth their time to sell. We gave it away to staff who wanted an IRIX box at home. It was usable enough for that.
And you do you know how it all turned out? The Debian systems will not only much faster and much cheaper (not to mention rack-mountable) than the SGI kit they replaced, they were also far more reliable. No more middle-of-the-night pages.
Best UNIX ever created? You must have stock in SGI
I'm not saying that IRIX is bad, but I'd rather have Solaris, and I'd rather have (for most applications; there are some where the task would dictate Solaris) Linux or FreeBSD than either of them.
WE are not writing of the greatest *nix ever invented. I am
So you think I should be beaten for being smarter than you, hmmm? Mighty big talk from someone who doesn't dare post logged in. I'd offer to meet you somewhere, but you'd probably have to get your mom to drive you to the fight.
I also worked at an ISP that ran its mail system on IRIX and migrated it to Debian, and our experience was nothing at all like yours. While I no longer work there, they are still running Debian and to the best of my knowledge (which is pretty good; I still keep in touch), they have delivered 100% mail system uptime since migrating to Debian, something we were not able to do with our SGI boxen.
Partly on the basis of that experience, I moved from running RH on my workstation to running Debian, and I've never been sorry about that, either.
Our migration from IRIX to Debian was a complete success because of two things:
1) We had, collectively, a lot of talent on Linux;
2) The sysadmin put in charge of the project had a lot of talent and experience on Debian; the rest of us had most of our experience in Solaris, BSD, and Red Hat. The IRIX guy had moved to another department by then.
What was the difference? Not lack of talent, I think. It sounds like you know what you are doing. Perhaps a matter of choosing appropriate hardware, though. We didn't screw around with ATA RAID (this was in the pre-SATA days, but that wouldn't have mattered) or anything that was less than server grade. This was a mission-critical system, and we used only server-grade hardware that was known to be very well supported.
The hosts we used were six dual-CPU rackmount cases running SCSI disks (RAID 1) for the OS install, and all the important stuff was on SAN (RAID 5 there).
Everything was absolutely bulletproof. How bulletproof? We installed Woody, with the 2.2 kernel (this was the late 1990s, and 2.4 was still experiencing some growing pains) and it worked perfectly right out of the box.
As I noted at the top, they are still at 100% mail system uptime to this day, to the best of my (fairly good) knowledge. They are still running Debian Stable.
Many other people can tell you stories just like this. Debian most certainly has a place in a shop that needs to get things done, a place that can perhaps only be taken by FreeBSD (with the possible exception of Slackware, Debian Stable is the only Linux distro I've ever used that can match FreeBSD for stability, or at least come very close).
I'm not saying you don't know what you're doing, I'm sure you do. You're probably a better sysadmin than I am. However, I do see one thing that you did wrong. You chose (or perhaps the customer's budget chose for you) what some people would call "toy hardware." Debian Stable often isn't the best fit on the block with that stuff. But if you had been using a proper server box with SCSI (or at the least parallel ATA; I *still* don't like SATA support under Linux much), I think it would have been all right.
One other thing I would have done differently is this: as soon as I found that I had problems with the hardware and the distro I had chosen, one or the other would have been jettisoned. For a server application, it would have been the hardware if I had the latitude to make that decision. Even today, a server you need to depend on should use SCSI disks (I'm still partial to Adaptec adapters) and known top-quality parts.
With all due respect, while building an identical machine in your lab was the smart way to do it, investing hundreds of hours into making Debian work with that hardware was not. It would have been cheaper to *buy* a proper box and just *give* it to the customer. Alternatively, if that hardware was cast in concrete, early on you should have chosen a different distro, one that is focused on a single hardware platform and that places more emphasis on supporting the bleeding edge than on rock-solid stability for tried and true equipment. Debian is not that distro (not to say it doesn't work fine on most stuff; I install Debian Sid on Frys' sale-quality hardware regularly without incident).
I would advance the idea that Frys sale-quality hardware (such as SATA-RAID) has no place in a shop that needs to get things done. You probably won't ex
I'm not aware of any backport to Sarge, so yes, pinning is what you need to read up on.
.deb and install it using dpkg -i.
:-)
Alternatively, you could download the statically linked tarball from the Skype website and just use that, operating it completely outside of the packaging system.
Yet a third alternative is to grab an RPM, use alien to convert it to a
I don't plan to follow Sarge into stable because stable tends to be a bit, well, conservative for typical workstation use. However, I will probably follow Sid into testing after Sarge is promoted to Stable.
Problems with the new installer? Uh, yeah, a lot of us have had that, especially where software RAID is involved
It was my understanding that Sabots were sub-caliber tungsten rounds that shed the outer carrier in flight, is that incorrect?
Thanks for the correction on the A-10 cannon.
Good point on Walmart. I live in the LA area, and there has been controversy (generated by activists who claim to have the community good at heart) over an attempt by Walmart to open a store in one of LA's poorer areas. This would generate a bunch of jobs in an area that has a serious unemployment problem, while simultaneous bringing decent, low-cost goods to an area that also has a poverty problem. The activists who opposed it apparently believe that it is better for a person who is poor and unemployed to have no job rather than a job at Walmart. Having been one or the other of those things at times in my life, I know from first-hand experience that they are wrong.
Funny how you don't see people griping about fast food restaurants, even though they pay less than Walmart and offer a lower quality product.
Ditto that. The reason I've never tried Netflix is b/c when I want to rent a movie, it's always spur-of-the-moment and I want it now. Not in a couple of days, now. And there's a Hollywood Video within walking distance of my apartment.
Not only is overlooked != censorship, at least some of them were probably overlooked on the basis of being factually inaccurate to the point of consituting a flat-out lie. For example:
"Most American weapons (missiles, smart bombs, dumb bombs, bullets, tank shells, cruise missiles, etc.) contain high amounts of radioactive uranium."
This is patently false. The *only* weapons that contain depleted uranium are some (but not all) anti-tank weapons. These included the 40 mm shells fired by the cannon on the A-10, and some anti-tank rounds fired by tanks (but again, not all. HEAT (High Explosive Anti-Tank) and sabot rounds do not contain depleted uranium).
No bullets contain depleted Uranium. Most tank shells do not. No missiles contain depleted uranium. Smart bombs do not contain depleted uranium. Bunker buster bombs do not contain depleted uranium. No dumb bombs contain depleted uranium.
Bullets are for use against personnel and non-armored vehicles. Even if there were enough DU available for use in bullets and it were not cost-prohibitive to make them, that would not be an effective use of DU.
Bombs, whether dumb or smart, are not anti-armor weapons, and in those instances that they are used on tanks, they depend upon their high-explosive capability. Bunker busters penetrate bunkers by being very large and heavy, with a thick, hardened casing filled with a lot of HE.
General-purpose air-to-surface missiles are all high-explosive, so are cruise missiles. A cruise missile that is carrying radioactive material isn't carrying DU; it's a nuke. Air-to-surface anti-tank missiles carry HEAT warheads.
Surface-to-surface anti-tank missiles also carry HEAT warheads.
If the level of "journalism" (if I can call "making things up" journalism) in any of the other articles is anything like that one, it's pretty obvious why these articles were not picked up by the mainstream press. It's because they are blatant lies.
There is some griping about them not providing source, but hey, they are not under any particular obligation to do so.
That doesn't mean I don't think it would be great to have a free software Skype client; it would be great.
For that matter, it would be great to have *any* free software VoIP solution that worked well and was interoperable with other popular ones such as Yahoo Messenger or Dialpad (who has been doing the PC to PSTN gateway thing a lot longer than Skype). That isn't to say there aren't FOSS solutions that do one or the other of those things, but so far I have not encountered one that I considered to be doing both of those things: working well *and* being interoperable.
Doing VoIP well is hard, and trying to be interoperable with closed-source players, even if they are using H.323, is doubly so. However, I don't think the difficulty of it is the main problem. There just doesn't seem to be a great deal of interest among FOSS programmers at writing that sort of thing. We've got tons of text IM clients and at least one entire system (Jabber), but they don't do voice. There is one that does voice and is sort of compatible with Yahoo voice (can't recall the name right now, it's written in Python), but it fails the "works well" test.
For those who are really distressed by the lack of a *good* open source VoIP solution, whether or not it interoperates with any of the others, write one if it really bothers you that much. If you can't, throw some money at someone who can and will. Or throw some money at people who are already working on it, so they can devote more time to it. If you can't throw much money, start an organization of people to whom this matters enough to pay for open source development, and collectively throw money. If you do this, I will even contribute. I think it would be great to have free software that does this. Not so great that I'm willing to start such an organization myself (but then, I'm not complaining about the lack of source code for Skype, either), but great enough that I'd make a donation.
A debian Sid package is also available, add this to /etc/apt/sources.list:
.deb directly).
deb http://www.bootsplash.de/files/debian unstable main
Then do an apt-get update, then apt-get install skype.
It currently installs 0.90.0.14-1, which is a little behind the latest version on the skype web site (it'd be nice to see them offer a
Sad but true. I sometimes tease my dad about all the stuff he prints out and saves in a hardcopy file, but someday he'll get to laugh at me when he's got some document I want that has disappeared off the web.
I guess the lesson here is that if there's a site with some documentation that is really important to us, we should wget as much of it as we need (or all of it, if we have the space), and just archive it. Since a lot of CD media doesn't seem too good on longevity, in some cases having it printed and bound is probably justified.
The real reason you're so worked up about this is because you are only trying to justify your own person preference and wrote the whole article with nothing but that goal, and now you're upset because someone sees right through it.
Is having the menu bar in the window better because it's my personal preference? Yes, absolutely. It makes it better for me, and that is the only thing that matters on my computer. No other thing and no other person matters on my computer.
Now, the fact that the great majority of people using Linux seem to prefer to have the menu bar in the window (or they wouldn't put it there) would tend to indicate that it's better for them, too. Now, if it's better for most people, then we could reasonably conclude that it's just plain better. I even know a number of Mac users who use and like Macs not because the menu bar is at the top, but in spite of that fact. That one big mistake isn't enough to take them away from an otherwise excellent platform.
I did learn a few things from your post(s) and article though. I learned that I not only know more about what actually works well in the real world than you do, and that I am most certainly politer and more well-adjusted than you, who are nothing but a troll dressing himself up in expert's clothing and trotting out the same stale article often enough that I recognized it on sight.
*plonk*
(You've probably heard that sound a lot before, but if not, get someone to explain it to you.)
Ah, yes, I've read that tro^H^H^H, uh, I mean, article before. I'm not the one with the credibility gap here. Putting the menu bar at the top of the screen severely reduces the utility of an otherwise not-bad interface.
Need empirical evidence? Both Gnome and KDE can do that, but you have to look a long time to find anyone who actually sets it that way and likes it.
You suggest I don't bother replying? What are you gonna do, troll me some more until I'm properly cowed? Sorry, it doesn't work. Climb back into your ivory tower before it turns into a pumpkin at midnight.
In Windows, the web browser and file browser are different programs. Is it not, then, Gnome that more closesly mimics Windows? Not that I like the Konqueror approach; I'd much prefer it be just a web browser. It's a good web browser, a poor file manager.
:-)
Either way, that doesn't really matter, though. You can make both KDE and Gnome look as much or as little like Windows as you care for.
Moreover, who really cares which GUI they emulate, or if they take a bit from both (which is what they in fact do)? I have a laundry list of complaints about Windows, but only one of them is about the GUI: that is natively only has one desktop. On my notebook I run eight, and on my desktop 10. That really lets me compartmentalize my work. (Yes, I know there are some solutions to do that on Windows, and I've tried them; however, I found them sufficiently unsatisfactory that I removed them again; happily, I have now secured leave from IT to partition my disk and install Linux, so that will no longer be an issue soon.)
The Windows GUI is not bad, really. In at least one respect (doesn't stick the menu bar at the top of the screen), it 's even better than Apple's.
No, the big problems with Windows are security, stability, performance, and the behavior of the company that makes it. Whether the last item belongs last or first, you can discuss amongst yourselves
The article notes that the dinars were relatively difficult to counterfeit, so that serves as kind of a built-in enforcement mechanism. If the note is hard enough to counterfeit that people will be able to identify most counterfeits, then even without a government to bust the counterfeiters, there won't be a serious problem with counterfeiting.
Y'know, that's what I really love about Slashdot: "I disagree with you and I have mod points" = "You're a troll."
I get mod points pretty often, and I use them fairly (how unslashdot of me, I know) and if I think I can't make a fair moderation, I don't mod at all.
I also meta-moderate often and check the context of just about every meta-moderation, and I punish those who abuse their mod points. To the modertation troll who modded me troll, someone who does M2 like I do is out there and will get you.
You can mod me OT for this, because it is.
Unfortunately it isn't applicable to your case, since this is a KDE application, but I believe Knoda, which works with MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and ODBC, and is scriptable with Python, sounds like it does much of what you need:
:-)
http://www.knoda.org/
It's a lot of work just to replace FileMaker (probably more work than upgrading, although you would get the desired SQL backend), but one possible option is to run X and KDE under OS X. I don't have a Mac and am not familiar with how well this would work (or not), so maybe you're sitting there right now and wondering what I'm on to suggest such a thing
D) When I could actually get modded up Informative just for explaining that kg = lbs x 2.2 :-P
You're probably trolling, but just in case you're really that stupid...
Read the first half of what you wrote: 1 kg = 2.2 lbs.
Now, quick, what is 1 x 2.2? Could it... 2.2?
I hope this isn't too complicated, but let's go on to a more advanced example.
If 1 kg = 2.2 pounds, then 2 kg (and you can verify this with a scale if you can't do simple arithmetic) must weigh 4.4 pounds. And by some odd coincidence, 2 x 2.2 = 4.4.
Now, if you were to divide 1 by 2.2, you would get app. 0.45, which doesn't fit very well into the idea that to convert kilograms to pounds, you divide the kilogram figure by 2.2, since 1 kg most certainly does not equally app. 0.45 lbs.
What, indeed, is the world coming to when people (pick one):
A) Really can't do simple arithmetic anymore;
B) Can't troll any better than claiming you divide kilograms by 2.2 to get pounds.
2. Put said underpants in a vending machine in Japan (note: they must be female's underpants, except in certain parts of Shinjuku).
There was a flying one just a couple days ago outside of my office. Of course, the landing wasn't too smooth; it was on its roof and pointing 180 degrees from its previous direction of travel.
You'd do much better to build a Politician Trebuchet, I think.