You know, I went and installed Mandrake 8.1 on my crappy Celeron 500 this past January and I was pleasantly surprised with the eye-candy-riddled installer, etc. I installed the office workstation package group. When I got done, I wrote a letter, and soon discovered that TeX was not included! What the hell? I get the impression that the folks at Mandrake are too busy trying to make their product look like an MS-bundle system to include a decent word processor. I think the world would be a better place if folks would try to stop imitating the WYSIWYG giants (Corel, MS, SUN) and start evangelizing about TeX and LaTeX. I can't remember the last time I used a WYSIWYG word processor when I had a choice.
As a mathematician, I am forever grateful for Knuth and Lamport. They are the Gutenburgs of our time.
One of the greatest features of HTML/XHTML is the ability to reference any object accessible via http within a document using an object element or an image element. However, to say that such an object is embedded in a document is not accurate. It is referenced by the document. Browsers may or may not choose to display referenced objects.
I think that image indexing services like Google, or any other web content creator, would not be violating any sort of copyright laws if they simply referenced the original images and let the browsers scale them to thumbnail size. I suspect they do not do this because browsers' resampling algorithms suck and images take loads of time to download; therefore, users would be dissatisfied with search results pages loading times.
I think that works placed on public http servers are inherently permissibly copyable: since the only way people can look at them is to obtain a copy in the first place, the content creator meant for the work to be copied in the first place.
You should set this up with a removeable tile subfloor so that you can run cables between racks in a pretty fashion. Power is gonna be a big concern. Get cable trays - separate ones for power and data - and mount them under the subfloor. Get yourself plenty of wire ties, too.
Most of the stuff you'll want can be gotten cheaply at Anixter.
Very, very carefully cut away the plactic IDE male receptor shielding leaving only the pins behind; then trim the other pins very carefully to the same length as the one that is pushed back. Then slide the cable back on very carefully in the correct orientation. Superglue that puppy on there as soon as you get it working.
I don't think they are leaving the right-brained folks behind; I just don't understand why they didn't do this a lot earlier.
They could never have continued the classic MacOS line. The memory managemant sucked donkey balls. You had to preset limits on memory usage on th binaries themselves; it was total crap. So was windows with its crappy GP faults. It seemed that every time you launched another application there was some sort of shared-memory violation.
Many UNIX variants have had memory management right since the 70's, and so has VMS. It seems that Apple and Microsoft ran the only bad systems on the block.
You should never need to recompile kernels daily. Learn to use kernel modules. Easy, easy, easy.
"Linux is a clone of the operating system Unix, written from scratch by Linus Torvalds with assistance from a loosely-knit team of hackers across the Net. It aims towards POSIX and Single UNIX Specification compliance."
I would assume that "aims" means it is not there yet.
I really wish they would change that to read something like "Linux is a kernel, written by Linus Torvalds and other folks, etc..., which in conjuction with the GNU utilities forms a complete UNIX-like operating system.
No, GNU/Linux and MacOS are not UNIX
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UNIX is defined by them as follows: "UNIX ® - the worldwide Single UNIX Specification integrating X/Open Company's XPG4, IEEE's POSIX Standards and ISO C. Through continual evolution, the Single UNIX Specification is the defacto and dejure standard definition for the UNIX system application programming interfaces.
"The majority of commercial vendors have registered UNIX® products, with most at the UNIX 95 level and newer products registering for UNIX 98."
Only products listed on their product registration
pages can be branded as UNIX. GNU (GNU's not UNIX) and Linux could, together with particular hardware, become certified UNIX, but first someone would have to pay the Open Group and demonstrate standards compliance.
It would be very easy for Apple to get MacOS certified on Power Macintosh computers, but they have yet to do so according to Open Group.
SOHCAHTOA (pronounced so - ka - TOE - ah) stands for lots of things: Some old hippie caught another hippie tripping on acid; Some old horse caught another horse taking oats away; Some old hag cought another hag touching orifices anal, etc, but leastly and lastly, Sine = opposite over hypotenuse, Cosine = adjacent over hypotenuse, Tangent = opposite over adjecent.
A math teacher once told me back in high school that cosin is more fun than sin.
I did not mean to imply that free software advocates are not capitalists... I only mean that open source projects like GNU require a spirit of communism to be successful. If nobody did any work for the good of the community, nothing would get done.
I think that those of us who do contribute of our time and coding skill rise above our capitalist selfishness in a way, because we do contribute for the benifit of a commune: that of the computer-using proletariat.
There is nothing to Linux except for the Kernel, so what the hell are you talking about? Linux is the kernel. The operating system is GNU, and together they are called GNU/Linux. No, no, you can't just call GNU the Linux OS, because it runs on top of other kernels, too, like Mach. It is the fault of the distro companies that folks don't know this. It would be nice if RedHat, Caldera and JoBobDistroCo all put prominent literature in their distros and on their web pages pointing to the FSF, but the companies, being capitalist entitities, are to a larger extent in it for the dough and thus fail to amplify the communist spirit of open source.
We must remember that there are people who cannot make it to the polls. I was in a wheelchair during last year's election due to a car accident, and it was too late to get an absentee ballot. I found it exceedingly hard to get to my place of polling because I live in a hilly mountain town and the bus didn't go close enough.
The Internet would be an ideal place for the mobility challenged to cast their vote. It is better to require everyone to cast their vote on the same day rather than send in early absentee votes because opinions may change over the lag time. I think that, rather than having traditional absentee paper ballots, we should be able to give the local board of elections our public keys and submit our enciphered ballots electronically. If we can't trust the Internet for election purposes, how can we for our financial transactions (ATMs) and taxes (e-file)?
I have always just ripped apart old hardware in my deep, dark closet of oboslete and obscure hardware, but, if for some reason you need to short a circuit and the poles for the jumper are just too close or too far away or too thick or thin or whatever for your recyled jumpers, you can always wire-wrap the poles together. You can get a nifty little tool at RadioShack to do this with and it will make you feel good and geeky. If you don't have at least one closet filled with a half dozen 386's and parts from a PDP11's tape drive or something like it, you have not yet mastered the ways of the force, young Skywalker.
It is a very interesting question, though. I bet they're made by the same fine folks who labor over those little plastic houses for monopoly games. I hear they're financed by Fannie Mae Micro.
I would reccomend putting some drives in another case, but here's an alternate solution:
Get a housing that will hold a bunch of two-circuit switches, one for every two drives. Get a bunch of those little hdd power cable ends (male and female) and some Y-cables, one for every two drives. Get the switches as well. Put the switches between the power supply and the drives. When you power up, throw a switch and let one pair spin up, repeat until done. Set a boot password on the BIOS. Don't enter it until all drives are spun up. If it does IDE detection before the passworf prompt, just do a soft reset.
This is really dumb. Get another power supply, or get one of those nifty DEC StorageWorks towers from your nearest data center that's chucking them out the window.
I find that I feel much, much more rested on less sleep if I sleep in a routine, smoething I haven't done much of since last summer.
As a college math major with a lot of programming interest, find I have a lot of obstacles to getting sleep, though. For example, after winding up a long day of classes and what little homework I choose to put effort into and band rehearsals (yeah, I'm one of those marching band freaks that puts 12 hours a week away just to perform in front of 12,000 sober fans and 6,000 drunk fratties and sah-rahs every other Saturday) and cooking dinner with the fiancee (I know I'm asking for trolls, I don't care), I typically either have a lot of work left to do or the roomie pressures me into playing another 2-hour Age of Empires scenario he's cooked up. I get to bed around 4 and have to get up early to finish studying for that damn 10 o'clock class and I swear to myself for the third semester in a row NO MORE MORNING CLASSES. Yeah, the frat eats up a lot of time too but I love those guys (and gals). Yea Kappa Kappa Psi.
Nights I do have less to do I am typically stricken with the ever-infectuous coding or deductive muses, and I compulsorily sit down and hack out some proof for a theorem I read about in a topology book or write some algorithm in Maple or even C. I can't afford Mathematica. I am trying to switch to Maxima, the GPL symbolic algebra system. Anyway, my point is this: sleep deprivation is an integral part of the college experience. I don't think I could live my life to its fullest if I spent more time in bed.
But, try and develop some kind of routine. If you are in college, try to schedule classes so that you start the same time each morning. I tried this last semester, but one of the two morning classes was a dumbass discreet math class in the CS department I had weaseled my way out of until now. I never went to that class but on the first day, and it really threw me off for my TR class. BTW, I got a C+ just based on the exam. I forgot which symbol was and and which was or in a circuit diagram. Otherwise, I would have had an A. She took my exam as the whole grade.
Tolerance for Casualties
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I think it is important to note that as war becomes more mechanized and human sacrifice is reduced, the governmental constituency, in the case of United States the enfranchised people, become less and less tolerant of casualties. One cause of this reduced tolerance is the widespread media coverage of any casualty which occurs.
Take a step back from the current wartime situation and look at a bigger picture. Take a statistical look at civil sacrifice as opposed to military sacrifice. Please understand that I am not trying to downplay military sacrifice and that I have the utmost respect for those who have volunteered to defend my nation, regardless of what feelings I may harbor towards the nation itself.
The government spares no expense in the development of techonologies which help to remove as much element of risk from the endeavors of the soldiers on and off the battlefield. For example, stealth bombers which cost hundreds of millions of dollars each after development costs to build cannot perform any function that traditional bomber aircraft cannot. They were developed for the sole purpose of reducing risk.
What is an analagous technology in the civilian realm? Take governors in cars. Such technology could greatly reduce risk by prohibiting drivers from exceeding dangeroulsy high speeds. Why don't we have them in all cars? Because we as Americans are willing to take on an increased risk to protect a civil liberty that isn't even legal: the liberty to exceed the speed limit. The speed limit is a rediculously hypocritical phenomenon in American legislation. The people of our nation enact legislation via our representative bicameral legislature, and therefore, our laws are what we want. But we all know that almost the entire constituency speeds not just occasionally, but each time they access our public highways.
I think reducing risk to human lives is a good thing. But why is it so much more popular with military technology than with civilian? Because of the media. If we were forced to look at pictures of the thousands of fatal car accidents that occur each day, we would demand technological improvements and maybe even drive more carefully; we would be willing to accept more inconvenience in our lives to protect them.
I suppose the media should be applauded, indeed, the film industry as well, for exposing the horror of conventional warfare to the constituency. This causes the taxpayers to realize that they do want to spend money to protect human life. It has also changed the way wars are faught: the public does not tolerate collateral civilian casualties, either.
I don't think the public realizes the disproportionate amount of money that goes to these military protections as opposed to the civilian ones. That's the primary problem with our apathetic constituency: the media has to shove problems in our faces before anyone cares about them.
For those who are religious, let us pray that all people are endowed with more than instinctual respect for human life. In an ethics class I took last semester, when we were studying relativism, we came to the rather dissapointing conclusion that the only respect for human life common to all humanity was the protection of life for the preservation of the species; this might not even apply to some who we might call terrorists.
Some of this post is very on-topic, but I include the rest for context. Moderators, please be kind.
I and a buddy recently completed a network installation for a small business. They had about 25 PC's in a 100-year-old wood-frame office building with asbetos everywhere and wanted these people to be able to utilize the Internet for such tasks as tracking packages via web sites, etc. They wanted to reduce costs by eliminating some 6 dialup accounts and free up phone lines for voice. They were less than a quarter mile from the local telco POP. So, they tried ADSL on one PC and consistently got about 1.5 Mbps down and about half that up. They loved it.
They asked me as an independent consultant what they should do to get the access to the other PC's. We looked at wiring the building, but due to the structural nightmare of the building, we decided that for their needs we could go with 802.11b. We dropped several CAT5e lines to three locations in the building: the computer room, where their mission-critical apps run on an AS400, and two access point mounts we set up.
We set up a SmoothWall box as their NAT since the evil ISP would only give us one static IP. It looked a lot better than FreeSCO. It was painless, absolutely painless to configure. But it had a shortcomming: it did not support PPPoE, which was necessary for the ADSL drop. Schucks! So we double-NATed using a little Linksys NAT/switch thingy to actually negotiate the PPP for us. We thought this would be nice because if someone were trying to hack in, they would have to circumvent 2 NAT's. We also thought it would have no significant impact on throughput. Big mistake (read on). Regardless, the NAT solution could remain in place should they ever want to add a stateful packet inspection firewall or something like that, or switch to better broadband, or even wire the building.
We spent almost an entire afternoon trying to configure the blasted access points. They were DLink 1000AP's. I followed DLink's instructions to the letter. I have a little beef with DLink about requiring a Windows machine to configure the things, but I can overlook that. I installed the configuration software on my laptop and was ready-to-rumble. The software failed repeatedly to detect the access point using a DLink branded 802.11b client device (USB DWL120). So I tried step two, isolating the AP's on an Ethernet segment. They failed detection again. So I fed the software MAC addresses manually. This failed. I was using only one machine with a known-to-work crossover patch cable. What the *(!@?
We eventually tried swtiching PC's, and then we noticed that the typeface DLink used to print the MAC addresses on their AP's made 5's look like 6's because the ink ran too much. I was really pissed. Upon getting the conf software to work on a desktop, I went back to my laptop to try again. It flat out wouldn't work with either of my 3Com CC10BT PCMCIA cards in different machines. Don't know why to this day; DLink couldn't help me on that one. But it did work on a desktop wit a 3Com 3c509b.
So, we got the access points set up and clients on all the PCs. We set up WEP encryption and tried to hack around a little to get in without the keys. We made sure we altered the default network ID and set good hard-to-guess passwords. It was like butta, for just one day.
Next weekend, we came back and hooked up more PC's. We went up to say 18 from 12. This is where we started having problems.
We used MAC address control on the APs as we promised the company we would. But after hours and hours of trial and error, we discovered that after adding more than 17 MAC addresses to the control list on one AP, the AP would spontaneously loose all of its configuration data. This worked this way on both AP's. DLink was not helpful. We would later RMA one of these and the replacement would do the same. So, we ended up having to have control lists that were local instead of network-wide. This defeated the roaming feature of 802.11b entirely (although nobody has a laptop there right now, I don't like it one bit). It also causes more difficulty in configuring the damn things. My friend, who is an Apple Campus Rep, haunts me to this day with suggestions of buying their AirPort brand equipment and says it would work better. Anyway, we choose DLink 'cause it was a hell of a lot cheaper than Orinoco.
We saved the company lotsa money on their dial-up. Next, we moved their web pages in house on a Red Hat box on a DMZ. DMZ wasn't all that in SmoothWall at the time (no hole poking), but it did what we needed it to. We moved their primary DNS to publicdns.org and set up MX records, the whole works. Set up a sendmail box. Set them up with PHPGroupWare. And, we encouraged them to make donations to the various projects which provided them with these fine products and services. I felt all warm and fuzzy. I had turned them into a free-software shop on commodity hardware and it all worked.
After a while, I started getting phone calls from them saying their web pages were only accessible to some clients. I looked into this. I left myself a way to get in (a port forwarded to a pc with sshd, I had permission to do this), and so I hopped on in and looked around. I became acutely aware that my ssh sessions were being dropped very frequently. I kept getting some sort of error from my ssh client during sessions.
We went back down to isolate the problem. We kept removing pieces of hardware from the network to figure out what the &*^% was going on, but found nothing. Then we learned SmoothWall had added support for PPPoE. We scrapped the Linksys, and we had no more dropped TCP sessions. It was freaky. I have seen the same problem affect two other people who used port forwarding since then with Linksys boxes (I help folks out on Mandrake Expert). SmoothWall had also added better DMZ support. I just have to say the system works beautifully.
Other issues we encountered in the project were users compromising security by using AOL clients. AOL clients create VPNs which in theory could allow hackers to circumvent your company's security. Don't let your users do this.
Oh, I almost forgot, the AS400. Up until we set them up with a network, they were using this shitty twinax serial network to talk to their AS400. It was expensive. It required shitty ISA adapters to be installed in every PC. It almost made me puke.
At the start of the project in our proposal we told them that they should use encrypt everything, even internally, and that that was just common sense. We told them they could put the AS400 on the LAN and use ssh instead of those card-and-twinax interfaces. I even verified this with my fiancee's dad, an old-AS400-fart himself, before I promised them this. WE WERE WRONG.
IBM told us they COULD NOT RUN SSHD WITHOUT BUYING A NEW MACHINE. That is such a load of crap, but we, having no experience with AS400's, could do nothing about it. The IBM man convinced them to run telnet. We told them we would take no responsibility for that. End-of-story.
Hope this has been an informative venting session for all of you. Please note that there was some relevant content in here, and that SmoothWall solved some of my problems, and I think it is a great product.
No, it defeats broadcast name resolution
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SMB can actually be run *without IP*, that's what he is talking about.
Without WINS servers or LMHOSTS, you cannot resolve NetBIOS names across different networks since netwrok broadcasts are used. MS is abandoning WINS in favor of DNS since it provided a redundant function.
I am an about-to-graduate college student at Appalachian State, a universty of meager endowment and funds (due to the NC state budget crunch). I and millions like me are absolutely spoiled rotten by the 100 Mbps campus networks hooked up to gargantuan pipes, not to mention the cheap 802.11b access that floats around in many college towns for those who want to live in apartments. We exist on our peer-to-peer apps and our gratutious bandwidth consumption - personnally, I'd rather stream the headlines from CNN or MSNBC with my PC than have to reach 3ft. for a remote control.
My point is that in the next 10 years, a huge hunk of the workforce will have attended schools with broadband. Broadband is like crack. If I ever have to dial pu with a 33.6 modem again like I did last summer I am gonna go nuts. That huge hunk of workforce is going to be a major part of the constituency of our democracy, and if broadband isn't cheap and available, we will demand it be so (just like cable TV, which operates under heavy price controls in many places).
I predict the Internet will become like the roads and sewers of the nation - it will become public infrastructure. See Chicago MAN project article.
No, I don't. Not that I couldn't do it with my good 'ol ATI All-in-Wonder (rip tv shows, that is), but I am in college and have a kid and don't have time.
TiVo wants to allow their customers to record the maximum amount of high-quality video possible to the built-in storage medium, currently a great big hard drive.
I believe that up until now they have used some flavor of MPEG (Motion Picture Experts Group) compression. If TiVo were to use license Real's software, they could program their boxes to create low-bitrate copies of shows for viewing on PDA's, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, I went and installed Mandrake 8.1 on my crappy Celeron 500 this past January and I was pleasantly surprised with the eye-candy-riddled installer, etc. I installed the office workstation package group. When I got done, I wrote a letter, and soon discovered that TeX was not included! What the hell? I get the impression that the folks at Mandrake are too busy trying to make their product look like an MS-bundle system to include a decent word processor. I think the world would be a better place if folks would try to stop imitating the WYSIWYG giants (Corel, MS, SUN) and start evangelizing about TeX and LaTeX. I can't remember the last time I used a WYSIWYG word processor when I had a choice.
As a mathematician, I am forever grateful for Knuth and Lamport. They are the Gutenburgs of our time.
One of the greatest features of HTML/XHTML is the ability to reference any object accessible via http within a document using an object element or an image element. However, to say that such an object is embedded in a document is not accurate. It is referenced by the document. Browsers may or may not choose to display referenced objects.
I think that image indexing services like Google, or any other web content creator, would not be violating any sort of copyright laws if they simply referenced the original images and let the browsers scale them to thumbnail size. I suspect they do not do this because browsers' resampling algorithms suck and images take loads of time to download; therefore, users would be dissatisfied with search results pages loading times.
I think that works placed on public http servers are inherently permissibly copyable: since the only way people can look at them is to obtain a copy in the first place, the content creator meant for the work to be copied in the first place.
You should set this up with a removeable tile subfloor so that you can run cables between racks in a pretty fashion. Power is gonna be a big concern. Get cable trays - separate ones for power and data - and mount them under the subfloor. Get yourself plenty of wire ties, too.
Most of the stuff you'll want can be gotten cheaply at Anixter.
Very, very carefully cut away the plactic IDE male receptor shielding leaving only the pins behind; then trim the other pins very carefully to the same length as the one that is pushed back. Then slide the cable back on very carefully in the correct orientation. Superglue that puppy on there as soon as you get it working.
You must have input vents to accomodate the exhaust fan or you will burn everything to hell.
I don't think they are leaving the right-brained folks behind; I just don't understand why they didn't do this a lot earlier.
They could never have continued the classic MacOS line. The memory managemant sucked donkey balls. You had to preset limits on memory usage on th binaries themselves; it was total crap. So was windows with its crappy GP faults. It seemed that every time you launched another application there was some sort of shared-memory violation.
Many UNIX variants have had memory management right since the 70's, and so has VMS. It seems that Apple and Microsoft ran the only bad systems on the block.
You should never need to recompile kernels daily. Learn to use kernel modules. Easy, easy, easy.
DEC [doh] ^H^H^H Compaq [doh] ^H^H^H^H^H^H HP
Only if you do not consider MacOS to be a *BSD.
This is taken from the kernel.org index page:
I would assume that "aims" means it is not there yet.
I really wish they would change that to read something like "Linux is a kernel, written by Linus Torvalds and other folks, etc..., which in conjuction with the GNU utilities forms a complete UNIX-like operating system.
UNIX is a registered trademark of the Open Group.
UNIX is defined by them as follows:
"UNIX ® - the worldwide Single UNIX Specification integrating X/Open Company's XPG4, IEEE's POSIX Standards and ISO C. Through continual evolution, the Single UNIX Specification is the defacto and dejure standard definition for the UNIX system application programming interfaces.
"The majority of commercial vendors have registered UNIX® products, with most at the UNIX 95 level and newer products registering for UNIX 98."
Only products listed on their product registration pages can be branded as UNIX. GNU (GNU's not UNIX) and Linux could, together with particular hardware, become certified UNIX, but first someone would have to pay the Open Group and demonstrate standards compliance.
It would be very easy for Apple to get MacOS certified on Power Macintosh computers, but they have yet to do so according to Open Group.
ASU's School of Music gives out BM's.
SOHCAHTOA (pronounced so - ka - TOE - ah)
stands for lots of things:
Some old hippie caught another hippie tripping on acid; Some old horse caught another horse taking oats away; Some old hag cought another hag touching orifices anal, etc, but leastly and lastly, Sine = opposite over hypotenuse, Cosine = adjacent over hypotenuse, Tangent = opposite over adjecent.
A math teacher once told me back in high school that cosin is more fun than sin.
I did not mean to imply that free software advocates are not capitalists... I only mean that open source projects like GNU require a spirit of communism to be successful. If nobody did any work for the good of the community, nothing would get done.
I think that those of us who do contribute of our time and coding skill rise above our capitalist selfishness in a way, because we do contribute for the benifit of a commune: that of the computer-using proletariat.
There is nothing to Linux except for the Kernel, so what the hell are you talking about? Linux is the kernel. The operating system is GNU, and together they are called GNU/Linux. No, no, you can't just call GNU the Linux OS, because it runs on top of other kernels, too, like Mach. It is the fault of the distro companies that folks don't know this. It would be nice if RedHat, Caldera and JoBobDistroCo all put prominent literature in their distros and on their web pages pointing to the FSF, but the companies, being capitalist entitities, are to a larger extent in it for the dough and thus fail to amplify the communist spirit of open source.
We must remember that there are people who cannot make it to the polls. I was in a wheelchair during last year's election due to a car accident, and it was too late to get an absentee ballot. I found it exceedingly hard to get to my place of polling because I live in a hilly mountain town and the bus didn't go close enough.
The Internet would be an ideal place for the mobility challenged to cast their vote. It is better to require everyone to cast their vote on the same day rather than send in early absentee votes because opinions may change over the lag time. I think that, rather than having traditional absentee paper ballots, we should be able to give the local board of elections our public keys and submit our enciphered ballots electronically. If we can't trust the Internet for election purposes, how can we for our financial transactions (ATMs) and taxes (e-file)?
I have always just ripped apart old hardware in my deep, dark closet of oboslete and obscure hardware, but, if for some reason you need to short a circuit and the poles for the jumper are just too close or too far away or too thick or thin or whatever for your recyled jumpers, you can always wire-wrap the poles together. You can get a nifty little tool at RadioShack to do this with and it will make you feel good and geeky. If you don't have at least one closet filled with a half dozen 386's and parts from a PDP11's tape drive or something like it, you have not yet mastered the ways of the force, young Skywalker.
It is a very interesting question, though. I bet they're made by the same fine folks who labor over those little plastic houses for monopoly games. I hear they're financed by Fannie Mae Micro.
Have you considered using GnuPG? It the FSF's equivalent application. It does have an outlook plugin and and a Windows front-end.
I would reccomend putting some drives in another case, but here's an alternate solution:
Get a housing that will hold a bunch of two-circuit switches, one for every two drives. Get a bunch of those little hdd power cable ends (male and female) and some Y-cables, one for every two drives. Get the switches as well. Put the switches between the power supply and the drives. When you power up, throw a switch and let one pair spin up, repeat until done. Set a boot password on the BIOS. Don't enter it until all drives are spun up. If it does IDE detection before the passworf prompt, just do a soft reset.
This is really dumb. Get another power supply, or get one of those nifty DEC StorageWorks towers from your nearest data center that's chucking them out the window.
I find that I feel much, much more rested on less sleep if I sleep in a routine, smoething I haven't done much of since last summer.
As a college math major with a lot of programming interest, find I have a lot of obstacles to getting sleep, though. For example, after winding up a long day of classes and what little homework I choose to put effort into and band rehearsals (yeah, I'm one of those marching band freaks that puts 12 hours a week away just to perform in front of 12,000 sober fans and 6,000 drunk fratties and sah-rahs every other Saturday) and cooking dinner with the fiancee (I know I'm asking for trolls, I don't care), I typically either have a lot of work left to do or the roomie pressures me into playing another 2-hour Age of Empires scenario he's cooked up. I get to bed around 4 and have to get up early to finish studying for that damn 10 o'clock class and I swear to myself for the third semester in a row NO MORE MORNING CLASSES. Yeah, the frat eats up a lot of time too but I love those guys (and gals). Yea Kappa Kappa Psi.
Nights I do have less to do I am typically stricken with the ever-infectuous coding or deductive muses, and I compulsorily sit down and hack out some proof for a theorem I read about in a topology book or write some algorithm in Maple or even C. I can't afford Mathematica. I am trying to switch to Maxima, the GPL symbolic algebra system. Anyway, my point is this: sleep deprivation is an integral part of the college experience. I don't think I could live my life to its fullest if I spent more time in bed.
But, try and develop some kind of routine. If you are in college, try to schedule classes so that you start the same time each morning. I tried this last semester, but one of the two morning classes was a dumbass discreet math class in the CS department I had weaseled my way out of until now. I never went to that class but on the first day, and it really threw me off for my TR class. BTW, I got a C+ just based on the exam. I forgot which symbol was and and which was or in a circuit diagram. Otherwise, I would have had an A. She took my exam as the whole grade.
I think it is important to note that as war becomes more mechanized and human sacrifice is reduced, the governmental constituency, in the case of United States the enfranchised people, become less and less tolerant of casualties. One cause of this reduced tolerance is the widespread media coverage of any casualty which occurs.
Take a step back from the current wartime situation and look at a bigger picture. Take a statistical look at civil sacrifice as opposed to military sacrifice. Please understand that I am not trying to downplay military sacrifice and that I have the utmost respect for those who have volunteered to defend my nation, regardless of what feelings I may harbor towards the nation itself.
The government spares no expense in the development of techonologies which help to remove as much element of risk from the endeavors of the soldiers on and off the battlefield. For example, stealth bombers which cost hundreds of millions of dollars each after development costs to build cannot perform any function that traditional bomber aircraft cannot. They were developed for the sole purpose of reducing risk.
What is an analagous technology in the civilian realm? Take governors in cars. Such technology could greatly reduce risk by prohibiting drivers from exceeding dangeroulsy high speeds. Why don't we have them in all cars? Because we as Americans are willing to take on an increased risk to protect a civil liberty that isn't even legal: the liberty to exceed the speed limit. The speed limit is a rediculously hypocritical phenomenon in American legislation. The people of our nation enact legislation via our representative bicameral legislature, and therefore, our laws are what we want. But we all know that almost the entire constituency speeds not just occasionally, but each time they access our public highways.
I think reducing risk to human lives is a good thing. But why is it so much more popular with military technology than with civilian? Because of the media. If we were forced to look at pictures of the thousands of fatal car accidents that occur each day, we would demand technological improvements and maybe even drive more carefully; we would be willing to accept more inconvenience in our lives to protect them.
I suppose the media should be applauded, indeed, the film industry as well, for exposing the horror of conventional warfare to the constituency. This causes the taxpayers to realize that they do want to spend money to protect human life. It has also changed the way wars are faught: the public does not tolerate collateral civilian casualties, either.
I don't think the public realizes the disproportionate amount of money that goes to these military protections as opposed to the civilian ones. That's the primary problem with our apathetic constituency: the media has to shove problems in our faces before anyone cares about them.
For those who are religious, let us pray that all people are endowed with more than instinctual respect for human life. In an ethics class I took last semester, when we were studying relativism, we came to the rather dissapointing conclusion that the only respect for human life common to all humanity was the protection of life for the preservation of the species; this might not even apply to some who we might call terrorists.
Just my humble rantings.
Some of this post is very on-topic, but I include the rest for context. Moderators, please be kind.
I and a buddy recently completed a network installation for a small business. They had about 25 PC's in a 100-year-old wood-frame office building with asbetos everywhere and wanted these people to be able to utilize the Internet for such tasks as tracking packages via web sites, etc. They wanted to reduce costs by eliminating some 6 dialup accounts and free up phone lines for voice. They were less than a quarter mile from the local telco POP. So, they tried ADSL on one PC and consistently got about 1.5 Mbps down and about half that up. They loved it.
They asked me as an independent consultant what they should do to get the access to the other PC's. We looked at wiring the building, but due to the structural nightmare of the building, we decided that for their needs we could go with 802.11b. We dropped several CAT5e lines to three locations in the building: the computer room, where their mission-critical apps run on an AS400, and two access point mounts we set up.
We set up a SmoothWall box as their NAT since the evil ISP would only give us one static IP. It looked a lot better than FreeSCO. It was painless, absolutely painless to configure. But it had a shortcomming: it did not support PPPoE, which was necessary for the ADSL drop. Schucks! So we double-NATed using a little Linksys NAT/switch thingy to actually negotiate the PPP for us. We thought this would be nice because if someone were trying to hack in, they would have to circumvent 2 NAT's. We also thought it would have no significant impact on throughput. Big mistake (read on). Regardless, the NAT solution could remain in place should they ever want to add a stateful packet inspection firewall or something like that, or switch to better broadband, or even wire the building.
We spent almost an entire afternoon trying to configure the blasted access points. They were DLink 1000AP's. I followed DLink's instructions to the letter. I have a little beef with DLink about requiring a Windows machine to configure the things, but I can overlook that. I installed the configuration software on my laptop and was ready-to-rumble. The software failed repeatedly to detect the access point using a DLink branded 802.11b client device (USB DWL120). So I tried step two, isolating the AP's on an Ethernet segment. They failed detection again. So I fed the software MAC addresses manually. This failed. I was using only one machine with a known-to-work crossover patch cable. What the *(!@?
We eventually tried swtiching PC's, and then we noticed that the typeface DLink used to print the MAC addresses on their AP's made 5's look like 6's because the ink ran too much. I was really pissed. Upon getting the conf software to work on a desktop, I went back to my laptop to try again. It flat out wouldn't work with either of my 3Com CC10BT PCMCIA cards in different machines. Don't know why to this day; DLink couldn't help me on that one. But it did work on a desktop wit a 3Com 3c509b.
So, we got the access points set up and clients on all the PCs. We set up WEP encryption and tried to hack around a little to get in without the keys. We made sure we altered the default network ID and set good hard-to-guess passwords. It was like butta, for just one day.
Next weekend, we came back and hooked up more PC's. We went up to say 18 from 12. This is where we started having problems.
We used MAC address control on the APs as we promised the company we would. But after hours and hours of trial and error, we discovered that after adding more than 17 MAC addresses to the control list on one AP, the AP would spontaneously loose all of its configuration data. This worked this way on both AP's. DLink was not helpful. We would later RMA one of these and the replacement would do the same. So, we ended up having to have control lists that were local instead of network-wide. This defeated the roaming feature of 802.11b entirely (although nobody has a laptop there right now, I don't like it one bit). It also causes more difficulty in configuring the damn things. My friend, who is an Apple Campus Rep, haunts me to this day with suggestions of buying their AirPort brand equipment and says it would work better. Anyway, we choose DLink 'cause it was a hell of a lot cheaper than Orinoco.
We saved the company lotsa money on their dial-up. Next, we moved their web pages in house on a Red Hat box on a DMZ. DMZ wasn't all that in SmoothWall at the time (no hole poking), but it did what we needed it to. We moved their primary DNS to publicdns.org and set up MX records, the whole works. Set up a sendmail box. Set them up with PHPGroupWare. And, we encouraged them to make donations to the various projects which provided them with these fine products and services. I felt all warm and fuzzy. I had turned them into a free-software shop on commodity hardware and it all worked.
After a while, I started getting phone calls from them saying their web pages were only accessible to some clients. I looked into this. I left myself a way to get in (a port forwarded to a pc with sshd, I had permission to do this), and so I hopped on in and looked around. I became acutely aware that my ssh sessions were being dropped very frequently. I kept getting some sort of error from my ssh client during sessions.
We went back down to isolate the problem. We kept removing pieces of hardware from the network to figure out what the &*^% was going on, but found nothing. Then we learned SmoothWall had added support for PPPoE. We scrapped the Linksys, and we had no more dropped TCP sessions. It was freaky . I have seen the same problem affect two other people who used port forwarding since then with Linksys boxes (I help folks out on Mandrake Expert). SmoothWall had also added better DMZ support. I just have to say the system works beautifully.
Other issues we encountered in the project were users compromising security by using AOL clients. AOL clients create VPNs which in theory could allow hackers to circumvent your company's security. Don't let your users do this.
Oh, I almost forgot, the AS400. Up until we set them up with a network, they were using this shitty twinax serial network to talk to their AS400. It was expensive. It required shitty ISA adapters to be installed in every PC. It almost made me puke.
At the start of the project in our proposal we told them that they should use encrypt everything, even internally, and that that was just common sense. We told them they could put the AS400 on the LAN and use ssh instead of those card-and-twinax interfaces. I even verified this with my fiancee's dad, an old-AS400-fart himself, before I promised them this. WE WERE WRONG.
IBM told us they COULD NOT RUN SSHD WITHOUT BUYING A NEW MACHINE. That is such a load of crap, but we, having no experience with AS400's, could do nothing about it. The IBM man convinced them to run telnet. We told them we would take no responsibility for that. End-of-story.
Hope this has been an informative venting session for all of you. Please note that there was some relevant content in here, and that SmoothWall solved some of my problems, and I think it is a great product.
SMB can actually be run *without IP*, that's what he is talking about.
Without WINS servers or LMHOSTS, you cannot resolve NetBIOS names across different networks since netwrok broadcasts are used. MS is abandoning WINS in favor of DNS since it provided a redundant function.
I am an about-to-graduate college student at Appalachian State, a universty of meager endowment and funds (due to the NC state budget crunch). I and millions like me are absolutely spoiled rotten by the 100 Mbps campus networks hooked up to gargantuan pipes, not to mention the cheap 802.11b access that floats around in many college towns for those who want to live in apartments. We exist on our peer-to-peer apps and our gratutious bandwidth consumption - personnally, I'd rather stream the headlines from CNN or MSNBC with my PC than have to reach 3ft. for a remote control.
My point is that in the next 10 years, a huge hunk of the workforce will have attended schools with broadband. Broadband is like crack. If I ever have to dial pu with a 33.6 modem again like I did last summer I am gonna go nuts. That huge hunk of workforce is going to be a major part of the constituency of our democracy, and if broadband isn't cheap and available, we will demand it be so (just like cable TV, which operates under heavy price controls in many places).
I predict the Internet will become like the roads and sewers of the nation - it will become public infrastructure. See Chicago MAN project article.
No, I don't. Not that I couldn't do it with my good 'ol ATI All-in-Wonder (rip tv shows, that is), but I am in college and have a kid and don't have time.
TiVo wants to allow their customers to record the maximum amount of high-quality video possible to the built-in storage medium, currently a great big hard drive.
I believe that up until now they have used some flavor of MPEG (Motion Picture Experts Group) compression. If TiVo were to use license Real's software, they could program their boxes to create low-bitrate copies of shows for viewing on PDA's, etc.