My son got in trouble for enabling the IE bar on the taskbar - he got an inschool suspension over it. Why? Because the people who use the technology to teach with didn't understand that it was a feature of the operating system - not something he hacked.
And I thought I had it bad... in 9th grade (a couple years ago - NT4 on all of the [P-166] workstations, 2000 an emerging technology), I demonstrated the use of "net send" to a couple friends. Of course, I got one of them (known to the teacher, along with myself, as "the usual suspects" - we knew a lot more than he did, and he obviously felt threatened for it) to do a global net send, and a message of my choosing popped up on every computer in the building. Oops. At least it wasn't obscene. We were removed from the class. It was only about 3 days from the end of the year, though, so we each still received 'A's in the course.
I've actually had some pretty good luck with technology use in the classroom. I got the usual labs full of Apple//e (and the rare and powerful//gs) on which to play Oregon Trail and Paper Airplane Factory from first through sixth grade. IBM PS/2 machines were being installed in some classrooms at the time, and most people had no idea how to use them. They had some crappy word processing software loaded, but the journey from the command prompt to the software was a little complicated for most of the users. So I whacked together a menu system out of a couple batch files, and basically became the sole point of contact for tech support at the school from then on. The upside to all of the extra work (which I didn't mind at all) was that there were enough computers to have a good chance to type an essay instead of writing it by hand, which was good because I have horrible handwriting (and still do). Later on, more towards the 5th/6th grade, we got some 486s capable of running Windows 3.1, and I taught a couple people basic HTML. At no time did my teachers try to use the computers to do their work from them, though; they fit a couple different roles (entertainment device, typewriter), but never were a replacement.
My other experience was sort of at the opposite end of the spectrum, as far as how the computers are used in the classroom. I took a 'tech lab' type class - you and a partner would rotate every 2 weeks through different 'stations' - CAD, web design (Frontpage and Flash), video production (Premiere), and a host of others. The format of the class was that you'd come in, sit at your station, check out the class webpage to see what the next thing you were supposed to be working on was, and do it. The teacher would go around and make sure everyone was working on something, then sit at his desk and take questions. I managed to scrape through the boring ones until I found something I liked - 3d modeling, using Rhinoceros. I still use that program (and all of the concepts), though I've added a few more apps and techniques to my repertoire (and the models look a lot better!). In this case, using the computers to teach but having an instructor present to answer questions worked for me, but your results may vary.
Actually, what you really should do, instead of "make xconfig" after pulling over the old config file, is "make oldconfig". It's a version of the (original, text-based) config that only asks you about configuration items that weren't defined in the file - like if a new feature (and thus a configuration item) is present in the newer kernel. BTW, the name for the kernel config file is.config (it's invisible - note the dot)
Before domestication, both your friendly neighborhood dog and cat would have been vicious beasties with sharp pointy teeth, and they were quite capable of inflicting serious damage on you (hell, you should see my current cat when the vacuum cleaner comes on). What makes you think it can't be done with another powerful predator?
And to actually answer your question, It'd be a cool, unique pet, and I already like cats a lot. Plus, why not? I suppose in a worst-case scenario, it being 1/8 normal size plus the clumsy (but cool!) oversized canine teeth would make it hard for it to wrap its mouth around more than my fingers or the side of my foot. As long as I can convince him to spare my mousing hand, I think I'll be fine:)
I'm waiting for a cool genetically-engineered pet, like a saber-tooth tiger (preferrably, to borrow a line, "Identical in every way, but 1/8 the size"). Now that would be worth having!
Go ahead, parents. Regulate my internet access (16 year old college student talking here). Just don't block slashdot and bash.org, for the love of god! I mean, to hell with porn, you have to get your priorities straight.
Although it probably would be more like my regulation of their internet access, seeing as how I hold the only passwords to the Sun box which serves as gateway to the internet. Also, I doubt my dad knows Solaris.
Just because the PSU is rated at 600w doesn't mean it's drawing 600w all the time. Keep in mind that the PSU is designed to power hard drives, removable drives, fans, memory, PCI(-X) cards, external firewire devices, monitors (via the ADC connector), etc all at once. I imagine there's a fair amount of excess capacity built in.
You also have to remember, though, that 600w is the output rating of the supply - not necessarily how much it draws
from the AC line. Switching power supplies (especially those made by the lowest bidder) are not 100% efficient - so even
though there may be less than 600W drawn from the regulated outputs, it's pulling in more than that (and converting it to heat). A perfectly efficient switching PS wouldn't need a fan - since Apple's (and every other computer manufacturer's) does, it's wasting more than just an insignificant portion of energy during the conversion. A quick glance at a 400w power supply for a PC that I have rates its input at 120V 10A (for the full 400w output). I'd hope that the G5's power supply is more efficient than that, because then it'd be using (10 / 400 * 600) 15 amps, which is 1800 watts at 120v.
Actually, they don't even provide the search mechanism. When you connect to the Kazaa server, it just gives you a list of some "supernodes" - people using Kazaa with fast connections. You connect to a supernode and it relays your search requests.
I'll second that - Final Fantasy games (that I've played, at least) have had consistently awesome soundtracks. Especially FF6 / FF3 (same game).
On that note, I'll chip in for Halo, too. The game kicks ass, and its music amplifies its ass-kicking awesomeness by an obscenely large factor. It just wouldn't be the same without the music.
Futurama [Fry]: 'This'll finance my search for a new flavor of crayon!
Air Force Delta: Any of the music.
Halo: Covenant elite saying 'Wort wort wort' when annoyed or suprised
Quake 3: 'Humiliation'
Futurama [Bender]: 'I'm addicted to shiny things.'
And that's just what I can think of right now. So many quotes, so little memory space (Futurama, the game and the episodes, are highly quotable in particular.)
Go search for and download a free app (kext and settings panel) called uControl. It lets you change some keyboard mappings (like turning caps lock into a control key), but it also lets you add scrolling functionality to your trackpad. Holding down the fn key and dragging makes it scroll, both horizontally and vertically (but you can disable the horizontal scrolling).
Yeah, it would have to drop back into real mode. The assumption is, though, that there will be enough of the machine (and kernel) left to reboot and write a panic log. If not? Oh well, the machine crashes again. Not like it'll hurt anything (checksumming the crash dump code once when its loaded and again before it dumps to disk will ensure that no bits have been flipped, and sanity checking both on the inputs and outputs should take care of any weirdness not caught by that). Most of the kernel panics I've experienced were not due to hardware problems or anything that would prevent a second boot such as what I described, but software issues that could have easily dumped a proper log with my method. A device driver taking the system down is a favorite, which always left plenty of Linux intact for me to SysRQ my way to a clean unmount and reboot.
OK, I've got an idea. When it panics, it reruns the bootloader (use BIOS calls to read the first HD sector and go from there) and passes it some special flags which basically say "I did a bad thing, clean up after me." The bootloader will unpack another set of routines (checksummed for quality) in the same way it loads the Linux kernel off of the HD, and place them into an area of RAM that's hopefully not used by anything kernel related (app space). It will then read in the pagetables and other info still resident in RAM (use the Linux kernel on the HD for reference / symbol tables, or rebuild the crashdump app at the same time as the kernel with the same memory offsets and values), and formulate a meaningful crashdump. It'll then read in the partition table / slicetable / disk label / whatever, and find and write over the swap partition with the dump (making sure that the swap partiton actually is a swap partition - read its header and such, just in case the partition table was mangled). It will then reboot the computer. Upon reboot, Linux will pick up on the swap partition containing a crash dump (changed magic number?) and copy it to a file on the HD, then reformat the swap partition and mount it as normal, making a note in the syslogs that it crashed and the crashdump can be found at $LOCATION. (And maybe pass control to a different rc file, for a limited or debugging sysinit.)
f course, usually you know there was a power failure because your UPS told you so.... I did have one case where we had a very brief outage (or maybe just a brownout). Every machine in the building had rebooted.... except one. That RS/6000 had an eerie log message like "power failure detected". And no, it was not on a UPS. I was rather impressed.
I had a similar interesting experience with an SGI Indy (Irix 6.5.13, or thereabouts). I was booting it up after it'd been sitting for a while, just to see what I had running on there. While it was going, and I was fumbling around for an ethernet cable for it (it takes several minutes at boot to wait for a cable instead of noting its absence and moving on), I kicked the power strip that it was on and the plug wiggled around in the wall socket. I heard a spark jump in the socket, and the monitor it was on (Dell/Sony Trinitron 19") went to half-height mode for a few seconds, spitting and clicking, turning the screen on and off and varying the vertical height randomly.
I expected the Indy to kernel panic or turn off. Instead, below the complaints about the missing ethernet cable ("en0: link carrier not detected" or similar), there was a lone status message: "Power failure detected."
No UPS, no power saving devices of any kind, only the filter caps in the power supply between the logic board and the unreliable, crufty power system of a 70 year old house at the mercy of a power strip first used on my (brand new at the time) Atari 800. The other computer on the power strip (350 P2 running RH 7.1) rebooted hard, right in the middle of heavy FS activity. I had to hit the reset button before it would come back up again, too - the brownout hung the POST.
I'll agree with you on that count. When the Athlon 1200+ was considered a leading-edge processor, I installed a Duron 600 on a K7S5A rev 1.0 for a friend. I've partially supressed the memory, but its drivers were INSANE. They were incredibly horrible, and crashy, but I managed to finetune them to the point where the machine didn't crash. It took hours. (My friend bought the board - not me - so it was his fault).
A different friend bought an Athlon XP 1800+ and K7S5A Revision (4 or 5, don't remember which). I fully expected him to have the same horrible experience, but it worked perfectly. Still works perfectly. Even when he knocked a pair of SMT capacitors off the bottom of the board. (I resoldered them for him. Now, if he performs a warm reset, he'll have to hit the button about 17 times before it boots, but cold-started it works perfectly and is rock-solid.)
Yeah, that happens. My 68332 CPU32 Reference Manual (one copy of two, thankfully) has a nice big transparent spot on the BTST instruction page, directly though the tables telling me what that instruction actually does and its arguments. I ended up writing the program mostly without that instruction (using its counterparts on different pages), waiting for a new manual in the mail...
If curiosity overpowering survival instinct is a geek trait, then I am out-geeked.
Definitely. Curiousity always comes before survival. It's right there in your standard-issue geek manual! (Next to the part about never, ever reading manuals.)
I meant to write 240. I'm in Washington, so definitely not in the UK or Australia. And what else would you call the incoming power lines? "Mains" sounded pretty good to me.
Unfortunately, you can't shift the blame to me. I live in Washington (but I don't work in a certain large campus in Redmond; if I did, I might just let it slide...)
I'll be honest with you (moderators and potential moderators): How does this come even close to being informative? It's supposed to be funny, or just stupid, depending on how you look at it.
Well, I installed the firmware hack on my 17" Powerbook. Looks to me like it's working fine; still reads CDs at least. I'm too poor to buy DVD-R discs (spent all my money on the Powerbook), so I can't say if there are any improvements in that department. At least nothing's burst into flames yet.
OS 10 comes with Samba installed right out of the box; you can show a list of computers by NetBIOS name, mount SMB shares, and work with them very easily. Creating SMB shares is also easy, too; just turn on the SMB service, then go into the Users control panel and check the "allow this user to access files from Windows" box.
I'll have to agree with you here. I was working on an infected Windows box (I wasn't in charge of security for the box, so don't blame me). The RPC service had stopped, but it didn't reboot (Win2k Server must be a little nicer about that). I was debugging other problems at the time and went to the add/remove programs ctl. panel. No dice - it was just a big grey box with some (meaningless to me) text across the top. Computer Management worked, sort of - Disk Manager died, but the services box worked well enough for me to find the RPC service and start it again.
For a DB server, it obviously will keel over next time it tries to make a query (unless the data's been cached recently). A low-end router box, however, can go indefinately without a functioning root partition if it has enough RAM (everything important's still in cache when the drive dies). I had a Linux router whose HD started making some pretty godawful noises, so I unplugged it. The thing ran for 3 months until it got unplugged, without ever wondering where its HD went.
Slashdot Mirror
I've actually had some pretty good luck with technology use in the classroom. I got the usual labs full of Apple
My other experience was sort of at the opposite end of the spectrum, as far as how the computers are used in the classroom. I took a 'tech lab' type class - you and a partner would rotate every 2 weeks through different 'stations' - CAD, web design (Frontpage and Flash), video production (Premiere), and a host of others. The format of the class was that you'd come in, sit at your station, check out the class webpage to see what the next thing you were supposed to be working on was, and do it. The teacher would go around and make sure everyone was working on something, then sit at his desk and take questions. I managed to scrape through the boring ones until I found something I liked - 3d modeling, using Rhinoceros. I still use that program (and all of the concepts), though I've added a few more apps and techniques to my repertoire (and the models look a lot better!). In this case, using the computers to teach but having an instructor present to answer questions worked for me, but your results may vary.
Actually, what you really should do, instead of "make xconfig" after pulling over the old config file, is "make oldconfig". It's a version of the (original, text-based) config that only asks you about configuration items that weren't defined in the file - like if a new feature (and thus a configuration item) is present in the newer kernel. BTW, the name for the kernel config file is .config (it's invisible - note the dot)
Before domestication, both your friendly neighborhood dog and cat would have been vicious beasties with sharp pointy teeth, and they were quite capable of inflicting serious damage on you (hell, you should see my current cat when the vacuum cleaner comes on). What makes you think it can't be done with another powerful predator?
:)
And to actually answer your question, It'd be a cool, unique pet, and I already like cats a lot. Plus, why not? I suppose in a worst-case scenario, it being 1/8 normal size plus the clumsy (but cool!) oversized canine teeth would make it hard for it to wrap its mouth around more than my fingers or the side of my foot. As long as I can convince him to spare my mousing hand, I think I'll be fine
I'm waiting for a cool genetically-engineered pet, like a saber-tooth tiger (preferrably, to borrow a line, "Identical in every way, but 1/8 the size"). Now that would be worth having!
Go ahead, parents. Regulate my internet access (16 year old college student talking here). Just don't block slashdot and bash.org, for the love of god! I mean, to hell with porn, you have to get your priorities straight.
Although it probably would be more like my regulation of their internet access, seeing as how I hold the only passwords to the Sun box which serves as gateway to the internet. Also, I doubt my dad knows Solaris.
Actually, they don't even provide the search mechanism. When you connect to the Kazaa server, it just gives you a list of some "supernodes" - people using Kazaa with fast connections. You connect to a supernode and it relays your search requests.
I'll second that - Final Fantasy games (that I've played, at least) have had consistently awesome soundtracks. Especially FF6 / FF3 (same game).
On that note, I'll chip in for Halo, too. The game kicks ass, and its music amplifies its ass-kicking awesomeness by an obscenely large factor. It just wouldn't be the same without the music.
And that's just what I can think of right now. So many quotes, so little memory space (Futurama, the game and the episodes, are highly quotable in particular.)
Go search for and download a free app (kext and settings panel) called uControl. It lets you change some keyboard mappings (like turning caps lock into a control key), but it also lets you add scrolling functionality to your trackpad. Holding down the fn key and dragging makes it scroll, both horizontally and vertically (but you can disable the horizontal scrolling).
Yeah, it would have to drop back into real mode. The assumption is, though, that there will be enough of the machine (and kernel) left to reboot and write a panic log. If not? Oh well, the machine crashes again. Not like it'll hurt anything (checksumming the crash dump code once when its loaded and again before it dumps to disk will ensure that no bits have been flipped, and sanity checking both on the inputs and outputs should take care of any weirdness not caught by that). Most of the kernel panics I've experienced were not due to hardware problems or anything that would prevent a second boot such as what I described, but software issues that could have easily dumped a proper log with my method. A device driver taking the system down is a favorite, which always left plenty of Linux intact for me to SysRQ my way to a clean unmount and reboot.
OK, I've got an idea. When it panics, it reruns the bootloader (use BIOS calls to read the first HD sector and go from there) and passes it some special flags which basically say "I did a bad thing, clean up after me." The bootloader will unpack another set of routines (checksummed for quality) in the same way it loads the Linux kernel off of the HD, and place them into an area of RAM that's hopefully not used by anything kernel related (app space). It will then read in the pagetables and other info still resident in RAM (use the Linux kernel on the HD for reference / symbol tables, or rebuild the crashdump app at the same time as the kernel with the same memory offsets and values), and formulate a meaningful crashdump. It'll then read in the partition table / slicetable / disk label / whatever, and find and write over the swap partition with the dump (making sure that the swap partiton actually is a swap partition - read its header and such, just in case the partition table was mangled). It will then reboot the computer. Upon reboot, Linux will pick up on the swap partition containing a crash dump (changed magic number?) and copy it to a file on the HD, then reformat the swap partition and mount it as normal, making a note in the syslogs that it crashed and the crashdump can be found at $LOCATION. (And maybe pass control to a different rc file, for a limited or debugging sysinit.)
I expected the Indy to kernel panic or turn off. Instead, below the complaints about the missing ethernet cable ("en0: link carrier not detected" or similar), there was a lone status message: "Power failure detected."
No UPS, no power saving devices of any kind, only the filter caps in the power supply between the logic board and the unreliable, crufty power system of a 70 year old house at the mercy of a power strip first used on my (brand new at the time) Atari 800. The other computer on the power strip (350 P2 running RH 7.1) rebooted hard, right in the middle of heavy FS activity. I had to hit the reset button before it would come back up again, too - the brownout hung the POST.
I'll agree with you on that count. When the Athlon 1200+ was considered a leading-edge processor, I installed a Duron 600 on a K7S5A rev 1.0 for a friend. I've partially supressed the memory, but its drivers were INSANE. They were incredibly horrible, and crashy, but I managed to finetune them to the point where the machine didn't crash. It took hours. (My friend bought the board - not me - so it was his fault).
A different friend bought an Athlon XP 1800+ and K7S5A Revision (4 or 5, don't remember which). I fully expected him to have the same horrible experience, but it worked perfectly. Still works perfectly. Even when he knocked a pair of SMT capacitors off the bottom of the board. (I resoldered them for him. Now, if he performs a warm reset, he'll have to hit the button about 17 times before it boots, but cold-started it works perfectly and is rock-solid.)
Yeah, that happens. My 68332 CPU32 Reference Manual (one copy of two, thankfully) has a nice big transparent spot on the BTST instruction page, directly though the tables telling me what that instruction actually does and its arguments. I ended up writing the program mostly without that instruction (using its counterparts on different pages), waiting for a new manual in the mail...
Unfortunately, I cant. He's dead (old age, not too many volts).
I meant to write 240. I'm in Washington, so definitely not in the UK or Australia. And what else would you call the incoming power lines? "Mains" sounded pretty good to me.
Unfortunately, you can't shift the blame to me. I live in Washington (but I don't work in a certain large campus in Redmond; if I did, I might just let it slide...)
I'll be honest with you (moderators and potential moderators): How does this come even close to being informative? It's supposed to be funny, or just stupid, depending on how you look at it.
Well, I installed the firmware hack on my 17" Powerbook. Looks to me like it's working fine; still reads CDs at least. I'm too poor to buy DVD-R discs (spent all my money on the Powerbook), so I can't say if there are any improvements in that department. At least nothing's burst into flames yet.
OS 10 comes with Samba installed right out of the box; you can show a list of computers by NetBIOS name, mount SMB shares, and work with them very easily. Creating SMB shares is also easy, too; just turn on the SMB service, then go into the Users control panel and check the "allow this user to access files from Windows" box.
I'll have to agree with you here. I was working on an infected Windows box (I wasn't in charge of security for the box, so don't blame me). The RPC service had stopped, but it didn't reboot (Win2k Server must be a little nicer about that). I was debugging other problems at the time and went to the add/remove programs ctl. panel. No dice - it was just a big grey box with some (meaningless to me) text across the top. Computer Management worked, sort of - Disk Manager died, but the services box worked well enough for me to find the RPC service and start it again.
Better idea. Make it kickstart a {Solaris/x86 | Debian | RedHat | Gentoo make world | BeOS | ... } install.
For a DB server, it obviously will keel over next time it tries to make a query (unless the data's been cached recently). A low-end router box, however, can go indefinately without a functioning root partition if it has enough RAM (everything important's still in cache when the drive dies). I had a Linux router whose HD started making some pretty godawful noises, so I unplugged it. The thing ran for 3 months until it got unplugged, without ever wondering where its HD went.