I have *really* wished for years to be able to do the reverse -- get Windows machines to talk NFS. Unfortunately I have yet to find a stable, reliable fast NFS client for Windows. . .
Ah, the classic Westinghouse-Edison argument. Edison wanted a distributed network of small DC generators for redundancy and safety while Westinghouse wanted centrally located AC power plants to achieve economies of scale.
In the US, the Westinghouse model won mostly because of the great distances between cities and towns that the DC-small-genrator model was *way* too inefficient (as line losses due to DC are massive compared to AC thus economies of scale can not be introduced).
What is really interesting is that Edison *really* wanted small DC generators on every block but the Westinghouse model was taking hold. In an attempt to scare the public about the "evils" of AC electricity, Edison invented the electric chair. Really messed up.
In the end, though, the major power grids in the US are interconnected with DC for frequency isolation. That is why the Northeast backout did not take out the entire continent.
As for the whole deregulation thing, the Edison model would have worked beutifully degregulated because it would have been smaller, more isolated (the left hand does not need to know what the right hand is doing) -- but who wants a generator on their street block (pollution, noise, etc)? The Westinghouse model is much better, but the problem is that it creates what economists call a natural monopoly -- the economies of scale are SO great that breaking it up in any way will cause price increases. ..but on the other hand a monopoly is too powerful so the only solution is a government run agency. The inefficiency of government is by far covered by the larger economies of scale. Moreover, since the system is "owned" by one company, the company is responsible for the whole system, including maintainence, and there is one person to point the finger at and the "blame game" never ensues where nothing gets fixed. Moreover, the company is only accountable to the people and not stock holders, so corner-cutting to give more profits to the stock holders does not happen.
I did a lot of hobby-type research on this issue and I have often wondered the same thing. PCI cards with DIMM slots should be very cheap to manufacture in mass quantities but unfortunatly it is still a niche market and they are a lot of money.
It would be fairly easy to implement -- all you really need is a memory controller, a PCI chip and a DMA controller. Then you can map the memory directly to the processor's address space and use it as swap that is an order of magnitude faster then disk but significantly slower then RAM. In fact, you can do that right now indirectly under Linux -- if you have a video card with loads of RAM you can use it as swap.
Now, back on topic, you can use a compact flash card as a hard disk -- in fact, it has the same pinout as IDE and will be detected by the BIOS. Under Linux I use one as my boot/rescue partition. There are a few caveats, though:
1) CF is slower then hard disks -- HDs do about 20MB/s transfer while CFs do about 6MB/s
2) Writes on CF are very slow -- about 2MB/s
3) The "1 million writes" issue -- if you write too many times to CF it will start getting data errors. If you put swap on CF you'll kill it pretty quickly.
4) You can not hot-swap CF used as a disk like you can not hot-swap IDE disks.
There are advantages, also:
1) CFs suck up little power 2) Seeks are fast 3) CFs do not suffer mechanical failures
Thus, if as you mentioned, there were cheap PCI boards with DIMM slots one could set up a massive amount of fast swap and abate problems #1, some of #2 and all of #3 with CF. Now with a 4GB CF card, one can store the entire OS, utilities and then some on a CF card -- thus the reality of cheap solid-state computers is here -- all we need is as you mentioned, tons of cheap, fast swap to make up for CF's deficiencies.
I was thinking of making these PCI boards, but I neither have the experience, knowledge nor tools to do so. . .
Just don't enable the IO-APIC in any VIA chipset regardless of OS and you are good. For some odd reason under Linux and Windows the IO-APIC causes completely random instability.
"Google has a lot of brand name, it has proven, cheap, realiable technology that is getting better. As long as they keep that edge, keep pushing the envelope, keep talking to businesses/consumers and find out what they want and deliver on it, MS will be left with YAMSP (Yet Another Money Sucking Project)."
See, that is the point that most of the tech-savvy miss. The mantra of the tech world is "make a better product and they will come." Problem is that average-joe-user does not have a clue about what is better -- and it is for this reason that Microsoft will win (as they always have -- regardless of how much better or innovative the competition is). This whole article made my heart sink. Imagine this:
CLIENT SIDE:
1) MSN search bar in IE, default search to MSN with a bad URL -- no way to change to Google
2) Search local files -- also kicks back a MSN search if nothing found -- no way to change to Google.
3) Build MSN search into Office and Outlook without any way to use Google that way.
With this, Joe average user will find it harder and harder to use Google and easier to use MSN, regardless of which is better. In addtion to this:
SERVER SIDE:
1) Build the ability for MSN robots to get metadata from the OS itself in an "undocumented" way that no one else can use with the next release of Windows (who cares if it opens security holes -- no one blames MS for security holes -- they blame "The Internet"). Think of the whole IIS/IE broken-tcp-IE-advantage thing here.
2) Make it such that IIS breaks other search engines robots
Overall it will make MSN seem better and Google seem worse in comparison. They have done all this before and they will do it again. Microsoft will win no matter how good Google is.
I invite anyone to counter my argument that average Joe user will use MSN over Google if MS makes it too tough to use Google through the desktop Monopoly.
The *really* scary part about this is that if MSN wins Microsoft will control the information that flows on the internet. Imagine all Linux-related web sites no loger getting indexed? The whole "search-for-linux-get-windows instead" points to this.
Personally, I've been rooting for 66Mhz 64-bit PCI for a *long* time -- ever since my k6/2 the peripherials I've been using has saturated the PCI bus -- but I've never been able to justify buying a $600 SMP motherboard to get it as well as expensive components.
Yet another standard it not such a great thing -- that means more market fragmentation and less opportunity for economies of scale with PCI [whatever] components.
I just wish that they would all agree to put 66Mhz 64-bit PCI in everything rather then coming out with the new standard of the week.
It is so amusing seeing all the people try to tone down what he was saying. ..much like a best man who was drunk at a wedding and said that the groom was an asshole:
Best Man: "Yeah, Bob is a an asshole and I hope that bitch broad gives him one hell of a life. . "
Good Friend: "I think that the best man has had a little too good of a time and what he means is. . " Best Man: "Screw you, I said he was an asshole and I mean it!"
Read below:
"No one is interested in destroying anyone's computer,". ..
"I'm interested," Hatch interrupted. He said damaging someone's computer "may be the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights."
Hatch was "apparently making a metaphorical point that if peer-to-peer networks don't take reasonable steps to prevent massive copyright infringement on the systems they create, Congress may be forced to consider stronger measures."
Hatch said. ". . . I'm all for destroying their machines. . . "
" Some legal experts suggested Hatch's provocative remarks were more likely intended to compel technology and music executives to work faster toward ways to protect copyrights online than to signal forthcoming legislation. "
"There's no excuse for anyone violating copyright laws," Hatch said.
Boucher described Hatch's role as chairman of the Judiciary Committee as "a very important position, so when Senator Hatch indicates his views with regard to a particular subject, we all take those views very seriously."
As a side note, what about bullets, descramblers and cables companies. ..isn't this pretty much the same thing?
Simply put: they're screwed. Introduction of new technology causes a skillset shift. It has been happening for hundreds of years.
Those that can not learn new skills are left out in the cold, replaced by those that can. If few can shift skills, then it is left to the next generation to fill the gaps.
Look at the computer industry -- as a programmer if you don't learn a new language every ten years or so you're out of work.
Take a basic class in macroeconomics -- this will explain it to you clearly.
Your argument has been going on for centuries. One common incarnation of it was "Malthusian" economics -- in the 1700s Robert Malthus predicted that we would all run out of food if the population kept growing and people would die by the masses from starvation. He never accounted for the fact that we can make more food with more technology.
How does it work, then? In a nutshell, seamstress gets replaced by a machine, machine puts her out of work, but seamstress can get a job as a machine operator. Machine makes more clothes then seamstress, thus she gets a higher wage (cutting out the Marxian labor value of theory, etc). Jobs are now availible for machine engineers, maintenence and manufacture, too. But the total number of jobs has dropped because all these people will not outnumber the number of people that were seamstresses and replaced.
How do you keep full employment, then? Well, clothes are now cheaper so more people will buy them (supply-demand) making a need for more machines and more machine operators.
Thus the answer is that you have to buy more stuff. Every machine that replaces people can sustain the current level of employment if people buy more stuff. That is why the economy has to be constantly growing at 2.5% per anum or else unemployment rises. You have to buy 2.5% more shit per year to keep unemployment low.
****Capitalism needs an exponeantially growing rate of consumption to survive****
That is why so many have predicted it will fail.
That is also why advertising is being shoved down your throat more and more year by year -- the market in some areas in saturated so companies convince you you need something so you will buy more stuff.
What if all the markets are saturated? What can a country do to keep unemployment low? They can conquer other countries and use them as markets to sell stuff to as well as have them be a source for cheap raw materials. What do you think the British Empire was all about?
What do you think us being the "world police" is all about?
The US Census was the birth of the punch card and indirectly, what we know of as IBM.
IBM history is really fascinating. For instance, in the great depression Watson made the same mistake as Henry Ford -- over-production. IBM would have struggled hard like Ford did if it wasn't for Roosevelt's New Deal (which, incidentally, needed a *lot* of tabulating machines to account for it all).
I could go on and on, but I suggest you get a good book such as "Computer: History of the Information Machine". The history of the computing industry is much like a geek soap opera.
I interpreted the "conflict" as "competition" like AMD vs Intel or WD vs Maxtor and not like US vs USSR.
In that sense, it is a very welcome thing as it will push the US to innovate in space again.
But on the other hand, this is under the assumption that the Europeans have leanred how to agree with each other. Over and over again they talk big, make ambitious plans together and start off great. The a few years down the line one country decies that they are better off without the plan and it starts a downward-spiral and the plan breaks down. As an example, the "unified currency" thing has been tried before -- but when the Berlin wall fell and Germany started spending big $$ building up East Germany causing monetary havoc, they all went their seperate ways again.
And as a final not about the "conflict" thing, I saw the US vs USSR "space wars" to be less about space and more about ICBMs initially. The Soviets said "hey, look -- we have nuclear ICBMs grown from the same V2 technology that you guys have -- but our control systems are so damn good that we can not only nail your continent, but put a dog on top of it and launch it into space" -- which freaked out the US (which was already freaked out that they stole nuclear technology through espionage). This then later ran into "who can have miltary control of space first" -- thus the space race. What I don't understand is how the whole fiasco morphed into being benevolent in the end as a scientific endeavor to the moon. That "morphing" is what I find is the most fascinating politically about the space race.
So do the US and Europe have ICMBs that they are waving between them that will scare the hell out of each other into a new space race and a "conflict"? I doubt it. Maybe the Chinses will scare the Americans into a new space race, though.
> . ..On top of it, there is no good network > browser. ..LinNeighborhood makes me mount > everything, then forces me to go into the > filesystem again and find where I mounted the > share
I've come up with an elegant solution that if I *ever* have some free time I will attempt to code.
The idea is simple: Get ghosting to work for autofs and set up IPC to nmbd. Autofs reads the "network neighborhood" like an auto.mount configuration file.
Thus, you go into "/net" on the CLI or in your favorite file browser (Konqueror/Nautilus/GMC/ etc) and you see a list of computers represented as directories (or your browser can make them pretty computer icons). You 'cd' into the directories and you get a list of shares represented as directories. You 'cd' into the shared and they are auto-mounted with mount.smbd in the backround completely transparent to the user. After your finished using it autofs will unmount it using its already existing timeout feature. (and yes, there could be an evil password cache in the users' home directories)
Very clear, concise and works at all levels (CLI and GUI) and is transparent as it should be. I feel that the current philosophy of making a GUI that specifically handles Windows shares differently underneath and attempting to hide it with icons is flawed. Make the base the same and you can use any file browser as they stand.
The problem is that every time I have attempted to code this I encounter a lot of stuff that I have to learn. It requires intimate knowledge of the kernel autofs, the userland daemon and nmbd -- all of which I don't have and will have to learn given enough time.
I am a very good seasoned UNIX system administrator. I am a decent coder, but am not seasoned enough to know all the libraries and tricks that I can use to code fast. Thus it will take me a *long* time to do this -- which I want to do but don't have the time to spare right now.
For bigger projects there is a company called Photomachining (http://www.photomachining.com) that has some pretty serious laser systems that sell for about $100k. Check it out. ..some pretty neat stuff.
They'll also laser machine just about anything for you in any custom way. Anything from PCBs to medical devices to laser-etched guitar picks.
The quality of printers has gone down lately accross the board. After messing with inkjet after inkjet and longing for my old Epson ESP/5000 dot matrix, I ran accross a Lexmark Optra S laser printer at a local computer show for $150.
It was the best printer investment that I ever made. 15ppm at 600x600 dpi with network card, built-in web server for printer status, telnet to enter PJL commands, an ftp server that you can ftp postscript files directly to (it understand ps natively) and even a built-in lpd daemon that talks to UNIX lpd -- all built-in to the printer!
They sell pretty cheap on ebay. Forget the poor quality inkjets, pick up a used laser that is a few years old with all the bells and whistles. Unless you want color, I pretty much guarantee that you won't be disappointed!
I'm guessing that you are referring to the z22 or the z32. You're right it won't work out-of-the-box with Mandrake 9.1, but if you can find a copy of plain old lpd and install it you can get it working nicely.
I don't have time to write a HOWTO here, but basically the way that it works is that you have lpd pass your print jobs to ghostscript which passes the ps to the proprietary Lexmark printer binary (for lack of a better term) which takes the postscript and transforms it into printer commands which are passed to the printer through the parallel port or USB port (both work).
Sucks up a ton of CPU time while printing, but since everything understands postscript under Linux (or could easily be converted to ps with ghostscript), all you have to do is choose "lpd" as your printer in all gnome, kde, cli, etc apps.
It is not for the faint of heart (have to mess with printcap, conversion scripts in/var/spool and ghostscript) but it does work very well (and transparently) when set up properly.
Attempting to set up that printer made me understand UNIX printing pretty damn well -- but then, too, I am one of those Linux masochists that always chooses the toughest way to set things up so that I can learn more about UNIX internals. As the saying goes, it is not the destination that is the most fun, but the trip.
Then, too, most people are not like me and want "plug and play". In that case, I can see your disappointment.
Not to mention the one thing that everyone seems to forget:
COMPACT FLASH IS THE SAME PINOUT AS IDE
Yes, you can use a compact flash card as an IDE drive. I use them as my/boot partition on linux boxes with a nice rescue installation for when the drive arrays go beserk.
They read slow (~4MB/s) and write slower (~2MB/s) but they're reliable and have no moving parts.
It is for this reason [it is an IDE drive] that I feel compact flash rocks and is far more versitile then the rest of the formats.
Simple car, 215 turbo horses for under $20k. It absolutely squashes everything in its class. The only thing that is in its class is the high model WRX (not the lower $24k one) which is $10k more.
You can not get more bang for your buck then this machine. I'm buying one when I get enough cash together.
There are some good HP Omnibook 510s on ebay. Nice, small, fast, have most of your requirements and Linux works pretty well on it. I have a pavillion zu1175 (same as Omnibook 500) and run Linux exclusively with no complaints.
Slashdot Mirror
I have *really* wished for years to be able to do the reverse -- get Windows machines to talk NFS. Unfortunately I have yet to find a stable, reliable fast NFS client for Windows. . .
Ah, the classic Westinghouse-Edison argument. Edison wanted a distributed network of small DC generators for redundancy and safety while Westinghouse wanted centrally located AC power plants to achieve economies of scale.
.but on the other hand a monopoly is too powerful so the only solution is a government run agency. The inefficiency of government is by far covered by the larger economies of scale. Moreover, since the system is "owned" by one company, the company is responsible for the whole system, including maintainence, and there is one person to point the finger at and the "blame game" never ensues where nothing gets fixed. Moreover, the company is only accountable to the people and not stock holders, so corner-cutting to give more profits to the stock holders does not happen.
In the US, the Westinghouse model won mostly because of the great distances between cities and towns that the DC-small-genrator model was *way* too inefficient (as line losses due to DC are massive compared to AC thus economies of scale can not be introduced).
What is really interesting is that Edison *really* wanted small DC generators on every block but the Westinghouse model was taking hold. In an attempt to scare the public about the "evils" of AC electricity, Edison invented the electric chair. Really messed up.
In the end, though, the major power grids in the US are interconnected with DC for frequency isolation. That is why the Northeast backout did not take out the entire continent.
As for the whole deregulation thing, the Edison model would have worked beutifully degregulated because it would have been smaller, more isolated (the left hand does not need to know what the right hand is doing) -- but who wants a generator on their street block (pollution, noise, etc)? The Westinghouse model is much better, but the problem is that it creates what economists call a natural monopoly -- the economies of scale are SO great that breaking it up in any way will cause price increases. .
I did a lot of hobby-type research on this issue and I have often wondered the same thing. PCI cards with DIMM slots should be very cheap to manufacture in mass quantities but unfortunatly it is still a niche market and they are a lot of money.
It would be fairly easy to implement -- all you really need is a memory controller, a PCI chip and a DMA controller. Then you can map the memory directly to the processor's address space and use it as swap that is an order of magnitude faster then disk but significantly slower then RAM. In fact, you can do that right now indirectly under Linux -- if you have a video card with loads of RAM you can use it as swap.
Now, back on topic, you can use a compact flash card as a hard disk -- in fact, it has the same pinout as IDE and will be detected by the BIOS. Under Linux I use one as my boot/rescue partition. There are a few caveats, though:
1) CF is slower then hard disks -- HDs do about 20MB/s transfer while CFs do about 6MB/s
2) Writes on CF are very slow -- about 2MB/s
3) The "1 million writes" issue -- if you write too many times to CF it will start getting data errors. If you put swap on CF you'll kill it pretty quickly.
4) You can not hot-swap CF used as a disk like you can not hot-swap IDE disks.
There are advantages, also:
1) CFs suck up little power
2) Seeks are fast
3) CFs do not suffer mechanical failures
Thus, if as you mentioned, there were cheap PCI boards with DIMM slots one could set up a massive amount of fast swap and abate problems #1, some of #2 and all of #3 with CF. Now with a 4GB CF card, one can store the entire OS, utilities and then some on a CF card -- thus the reality of cheap solid-state computers is here -- all we need is as you mentioned, tons of cheap, fast swap to make up for CF's deficiencies.
I was thinking of making these PCI boards, but I neither have the experience, knowledge nor tools to do so. . .
The Robber-Barons of the early 20th century were also very sucessful and charitable.
* Does this social darwinistic view of the "sucessful are right because if they weren't, they wouldn't be sucessful" a good view to take?
* Does charitability make up for bad business practices?
Just don't enable the IO-APIC in any VIA chipset regardless of OS and you are good. For some odd reason under Linux and Windows the IO-APIC causes completely random instability.
Oops . . .you are right, it is a Trackpoint II
If you liked the model M like I do, you can get a more modern version called the "Trackpoint IV".
l r= &ie=UTF-8&q=Trackpoint+IV+keyboard&spell=1
Same rugged keys, but it has a PS/2-style connector as well as a built-in trackpoint mouse (ala "nipple"). Plus it comes in black.
I bought one and it has become my favorite keyboard.
Picture:
http://images.google.com/images?svnum=10&hl=en&
"Google has a lot of brand name, it has proven, cheap, realiable technology that is getting better. As long as they keep that edge, keep pushing the envelope, keep talking to businesses/consumers and find out what they want and deliver on it, MS will be left with YAMSP (Yet Another Money Sucking Project)."
See, that is the point that most of the tech-savvy miss. The mantra of the tech world is "make a better product and they will come." Problem is that average-joe-user does not have a clue about what is better -- and it is for this reason that Microsoft will win (as they always have -- regardless of how much better or innovative the competition is). This whole article made my heart sink. Imagine this:
CLIENT SIDE:
1) MSN search bar in IE, default search to MSN with a bad URL -- no way to change to Google
2) Search local files -- also kicks back a MSN search if nothing found -- no way to change to Google.
3) Build MSN search into Office and Outlook without any way to use Google that way.
With this, Joe average user will find it harder and harder to use Google and easier to use MSN, regardless of which is better. In addtion to this:
SERVER SIDE:
1) Build the ability for MSN robots to get metadata from the OS itself in an "undocumented" way that no one else can use with the next release of Windows (who cares if it opens security holes -- no one blames MS for security holes -- they blame "The Internet"). Think of the whole IIS/IE broken-tcp-IE-advantage thing here.
2) Make it such that IIS breaks other search engines robots
Overall it will make MSN seem better and Google seem worse in comparison. They have done all this before and they will do it again. Microsoft will win no matter how good Google is.
I invite anyone to counter my argument that average Joe user will use MSN over Google if MS makes it too tough to use Google through the desktop Monopoly.
The *really* scary part about this is that if MSN wins Microsoft will control the information that flows on the internet. Imagine all Linux-related web sites no loger getting indexed? The whole "search-for-linux-get-windows instead" points to this.
OK, now we have these choices:
1) 33Mhz 32-bit PCI
2) Compact PCI
3) 66Mhz 32-bit PCI
4) 33Mhz 64-bit PCI
5) 66Mhz 64-bit PCI
6) PCI-X
7) PCI Express
8) AGP 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x
Personally, I've been rooting for 66Mhz 64-bit PCI
for a *long* time -- ever since my k6/2 the peripherials I've been using has saturated the PCI bus -- but I've never been able to justify buying a $600 SMP motherboard to get it as well as expensive components.
Yet another standard it not such a great thing -- that means more market fragmentation and less opportunity for economies of scale with PCI [whatever] components.
I just wish that they would all agree to put 66Mhz 64-bit PCI in everything rather then coming out with the new standard of the week.
It is so amusing seeing all the people try to tone down what he was saying. . .much like a best man who was drunk at a wedding and said that the groom was an asshole:
.
.isn't this pretty much the same thing?
Best Man: "Yeah, Bob is a an asshole and I hope that bitch broad gives him one hell of a life. . "
Good Friend: "I think that the best man has had a little too good of a time and what he means is. . "
Best Man: "Screw you, I said he was an asshole and I mean it!"
Read below:
"No one is interested in destroying anyone's computer,". .
"I'm interested," Hatch interrupted. He said damaging someone's computer "may be the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights."
Hatch was "apparently making a metaphorical point that if peer-to-peer networks don't take reasonable steps to prevent massive copyright infringement on the systems they create, Congress may be forced to consider stronger measures."
Hatch said. ". . . I'm all for destroying their machines. . . "
" Some legal experts suggested Hatch's provocative remarks were more likely intended to compel technology and music executives to work faster toward ways to protect copyrights online than to signal forthcoming legislation. "
"There's no excuse for anyone violating copyright laws," Hatch said.
Boucher described Hatch's role as chairman of the Judiciary Committee as "a very important position, so when Senator Hatch indicates his views with regard to a particular subject, we all take those views very seriously."
As a side note, what about bullets, descramblers and cables companies. .
Simply put: they're screwed. Introduction of new technology causes a skillset shift. It has been happening for hundreds of years.
Those that can not learn new skills are left out in the cold, replaced by those that can. If few can shift skills, then it is left to the next generation to fill the gaps.
Look at the computer industry -- as a programmer if you don't learn a new language every ten years or so you're out of work.
Its a byproduct of capitalism.
Take a basic class in macroeconomics -- this will explain it to you clearly.
Your argument has been going on for centuries. One common incarnation of it was "Malthusian" economics -- in the 1700s Robert Malthus predicted that we would all run out of food if the population kept growing and people would die by the masses from starvation. He never accounted for the fact that we can make more food with more technology.
How does it work, then? In a nutshell, seamstress gets replaced by a machine, machine puts her out of work, but seamstress can get a job as a machine operator. Machine makes more clothes then seamstress, thus she gets a higher wage (cutting out the Marxian labor value of theory, etc). Jobs are now availible for machine engineers, maintenence and manufacture, too. But the total number of jobs has dropped because all these people will not outnumber the number of people that were seamstresses and replaced.
How do you keep full employment, then? Well, clothes are now cheaper so more people will buy them (supply-demand) making a need for more machines and more machine operators.
Thus the answer is that you have to buy more stuff. Every machine that replaces people can sustain the current level of employment if people buy more stuff. That is why the economy has to be constantly growing at 2.5% per anum or else unemployment rises. You have to buy 2.5% more shit per year to keep unemployment low.
****Capitalism needs an exponeantially growing rate of consumption to survive****
That is why so many have predicted it will fail.
That is also why advertising is being shoved down your throat more and more year by year -- the market in some areas in saturated so companies convince you you need something so you will buy more stuff.
What if all the markets are saturated? What can a country do to keep unemployment low? They can conquer other countries and use them as markets to sell stuff to as well as have them be a source for cheap raw materials. What do you think the British Empire was all about?
What do you think us being the "world police" is all about?
Absolutely fascinating subject.
The part of IBM that has been around since the 1890s is Hollerinth:
- 00 2/history/hollerinth.html
http://www.cs.nyu.edu/courses/spring00/V22.0004
The US Census was the birth of the punch card and indirectly, what we know of as IBM.
IBM history is really fascinating. For instance, in the great depression Watson made the same mistake as Henry Ford -- over-production. IBM would have struggled hard like Ford did if it wasn't for Roosevelt's New Deal (which, incidentally, needed a *lot* of tabulating machines to account for it all).
I could go on and on, but I suggest you get a good book such as "Computer: History of the Information Machine". The history of the computing industry is much like a geek soap opera.
I interpreted the "conflict" as "competition" like AMD vs Intel or WD vs Maxtor and not like US vs USSR.
In that sense, it is a very welcome thing as it will push the US to innovate in space again.
But on the other hand, this is under the assumption that the Europeans have leanred how to agree with each other. Over and over again they talk big, make ambitious plans together and start off great. The a few years down the line one country decies that they are better off without the plan and it starts a downward-spiral and the plan breaks down. As an example, the "unified currency" thing has been tried before -- but when the Berlin wall fell and Germany started spending big $$ building up East Germany causing monetary havoc, they all went their seperate ways again.
And as a final not about the "conflict" thing, I saw the US vs USSR "space wars" to be less about space and more about ICBMs initially. The Soviets said "hey, look -- we have nuclear ICBMs grown from the same V2 technology that you guys have -- but our control systems are so damn good that we can not only nail your continent, but put a dog on top of it and launch it into space" -- which freaked out the US (which was already freaked out that they stole nuclear technology through espionage). This then later ran into "who can have miltary control of space first" -- thus the space race. What I don't understand is how the whole fiasco morphed into being benevolent in the end as a scientific endeavor to the moon. That "morphing" is what I find is the most fascinating politically about the space race.
So do the US and Europe have ICMBs that they are waving between them that will scare the hell out of each other into a new space race and a "conflict"? I doubt it. Maybe the Chinses will scare the Americans into a new space race, though.
Wouldn't that be a love pentagon ;).
> . . .On top of it, there is no good network .LinNeighborhood makes me mount
> browser. .
> everything, then forces me to go into the
> filesystem again and find where I mounted the
> share
I've come up with an elegant solution that if I *ever* have some free time I will attempt to code.
The idea is simple: Get ghosting to work for autofs and set up IPC to nmbd. Autofs reads the "network neighborhood" like an auto.mount configuration file.
Thus, you go into "/net" on the CLI or in your favorite file browser (Konqueror/Nautilus/GMC/ etc) and you see a list of computers represented as directories (or your browser can make them pretty computer icons). You 'cd' into the directories and you get a list of shares represented as directories. You 'cd' into the shared and they are auto-mounted with mount.smbd in the backround completely transparent to the user. After your finished using it autofs will unmount it using its already existing timeout feature. (and yes, there could be an evil password cache in the users' home directories)
Very clear, concise and works at all levels (CLI and GUI) and is transparent as it should be. I feel that the current philosophy of making a GUI that specifically handles Windows shares differently underneath and attempting to hide it with icons is flawed. Make the base the same and you can use any file browser as they stand.
The problem is that every time I have attempted to code this I encounter a lot of stuff that I have to learn. It requires intimate knowledge of the kernel autofs, the userland daemon and nmbd -- all of which I don't have and will have to learn given enough time.
I am a very good seasoned UNIX system administrator. I am a decent coder, but am not seasoned enough to know all the libraries and tricks that I can use to code fast. Thus it will take me a *long* time to do this -- which I want to do but don't have the time to spare right now.
For bigger projects there is a company called
Photomachining (http://www.photomachining.com)
that has some pretty serious laser systems that
sell for about $100k. Check it out. .
pretty neat stuff.
They'll also laser machine just about anything for
you in any custom way. Anything from PCBs to
medical devices to laser-etched guitar picks.
The quality of printers has gone down lately accross the board. After messing with inkjet after inkjet and longing for my old Epson ESP/5000 dot matrix, I ran accross a Lexmark Optra S laser printer at a local computer show for $150.
It was the best printer investment that I ever made. 15ppm at 600x600 dpi with network card, built-in web server for printer status, telnet to enter PJL commands, an ftp server that you can ftp postscript files directly to (it understand ps natively) and even a built-in lpd daemon that talks to UNIX lpd -- all built-in to the printer!
They sell pretty cheap on ebay. Forget the poor quality inkjets, pick up a used laser that is a few years old with all the bells and whistles. Unless you want color, I pretty much guarantee that you won't be disappointed!
I'm guessing that you are referring to the z22 or the z32. You're right it won't work out-of-the-box with Mandrake 9.1, but if you can find a copy of plain old lpd and install it you can get it working nicely.
/var/spool and ghostscript) but it does work very well (and transparently) when set up properly.
I don't have time to write a HOWTO here, but basically the way that it works is that you have lpd pass your print jobs to ghostscript which passes the ps to the proprietary Lexmark printer binary (for lack of a better term) which takes the postscript and transforms it into printer commands which are passed to the printer through the parallel port or USB port (both work).
Sucks up a ton of CPU time while printing, but since everything understands postscript under Linux (or could easily be converted to ps with ghostscript), all you have to do is choose "lpd" as your printer in all gnome, kde, cli, etc apps.
It is not for the faint of heart (have to mess with printcap, conversion scripts in
Attempting to set up that printer made me understand UNIX printing pretty damn well -- but then, too, I am one of those Linux masochists that always chooses the toughest way to set things up so that I can learn more about UNIX internals. As the saying goes, it is not the destination that is the most fun, but the trip.
Then, too, most people are not like me and want "plug and play". In that case, I can see your disappointment.
Not to mention the one thing that everyone seems to forget:
/boot partition on linux boxes with a nice rescue installation for when the drive arrays go beserk.
COMPACT FLASH IS THE SAME PINOUT AS IDE
Yes, you can use a compact flash card as an IDE drive. I use them as my
They read slow (~4MB/s) and write slower (~2MB/s) but they're reliable and have no moving parts.
It is for this reason [it is an IDE drive] that I feel compact flash rocks and is far more versitile then the rest of the formats.
Great question that I was wondering myself. At this point SCO (Caldera) may be cheaper then even the cost of a lawsuit.
Perhaps that was SCO's intention after all when they decided to go after IBM fisrt . . .
man mt -- one command I use often
Simple car, 215 turbo horses for under $20k. It absolutely squashes everything in its class. The only thing that is in its class is the high model WRX (not the lower $24k one) which is $10k more.
You can not get more bang for your buck then this machine. I'm buying one when I get enough cash together.
There are some good HP Omnibook 510s on ebay. Nice, small, fast, have most of your requirements and Linux works pretty well on it. I have a pavillion zu1175 (same as Omnibook 500) and run Linux exclusively with no complaints.
Unfortunately, if it is a percentage below 100 it is asymptotic :).