2) Check your hard disk(s) and make sure that they are spinning up OK by the time the BIOS finishes.
3) Check for services starting which address programs or hardware which may have been removed.
4) Swap the power supply.
5) Wipe the hard disk and (if you must use MS Windows) reinstall from scratch. I've seen machines from big manufacturers that had all sorts of weird problems which went away with a default install.
The above checks cost nothing but your time, but then there's option #6.
The last place I worked at had a bonus scheme, the only problem was that performance levels were set impossibly high and the resulting bonus worked out at about 5% of your pay. I finally realized that it wasn't worth the stress, gray hair and ulcers so I just did my job and didn't bother busting a gut for little reward.
Here's a hint, if you want to setup a bonus scheme then ask your staff what they want as rewards.
Looking at this from an engineering standpoint you have two problems to solve, and neither of them are easy:
1) You need to lock frame sync and line sync on all of your sources of video. If the frame sync is not locked then you will have a number of windows with 'rolling' pictures, if the line sync is not locked then a number of pictures will be unreadable.
2) You need to switch between your image sources cleanly and VERY quickly. At 800x600 a single line is scanned in 0.000030414 seconds (1/32880 Hz). Divide that by 800 and you can see that to generate a single pixel line between images needs a switching time of 0.000000038 seconds. All of this needs to be synchronized correctly with item (1) above.
Now you see why the commercial solutions are so expensive. Give me $5,000 and I'll build and debug one for you
YENAGOA,Nigeria (Reuters) - A Nigerian state governor charged with money laundering in Britain has escaped disguised as a woman and returned to his home state, where he enjoys immunity from prosecution. The return of Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, governor of Bayelsa state in the oil-producing Niger Delta, deals a severe blow to President Olusegun Obasanjo's campaign to curb theft of public resources by some state governors.
"As he drove into town, the streets were lined with crowds of people waving white handkerchiefs and jubilating," said Oronto Douglas, a commissioner in the Bayelsa state government. "He came into government house, knelt down and prayed. Then he addressed thousands thanking the Ijaw people for bringing him back," he said from the Bayelsa state capital Yenagoa.
The Ijaw are the dominant ethnic group in the southern Niger Delta. Alamieyeseigha's detention in Britain was interpreted by many Ijaw as a slight on them as he is the only Ijaw among Nigeria's 36 state governors.
Nigeria's Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) said it would continue its investigation into Alamieyeseigha's financial dealings and would do whatever Nigerian law allowed to bring him to justice. "It's a tragedy, it's a challenge to us and to our justice system," EFCC Chairman Nuhu Ribadu told a news conference in the federal capital Abuja. "We know that he dressed as a woman. We know that he forged documents to gain entrance and pass through undetected both at the UK side and the Nigerian side," he said, adding that Alamieyeseigha had slipped into Nigeria on Sunday evening.
Alamieyeseigha had earlier told supporters in his home village of Amassoma in Bayelsa that the way he escaped was a "mystery" he would explain at the appropriate time.
A MILLION POUNDS IN CASH
Many of the governor's loyalists allege that he is being persecuted because of his allegiance to Vice President Atiku Abubakar, who is engaged in a fierce power struggle with Obasanjo ahead of the next presidential election in 2007. Asked about this allegation, Ribadu said the EFCC had no interest in politics, and being in politics was not a licence to steal public funds and then complain of persecution.
A British court charged Alamieyeseigha in September with laundering 1.8 million pounds and he was given bail on condition that he did not travel abroad. He had handed in his passport and a large bail bond to authorities in London.
During their investigation, UK police found 1 million pounds in cash in his London home.
Nigeria is ranked sixth most corrupt country in the world by independent watchdog Transparency International.
Obasanjo says his government is fighting corruption, and a handful of people in high places have lost their jobs or been charged. But critics say the anti-graft campaign targets only Obasanjo's opponents, leaving his allies undisturbed.
Alamieyeseigha's immunity from prosecution runs out when he steps down. His term ends in 2007.
He is the second Nigerian state governor to escape British justice after Joshua Dariye of Plateau state, who was under investigation for money laundering, returned home in 2004. He is now wanted by police.
I sure hope that they've fixed the VIA C3 bug that was present on the last distribution, 'Breezy Badger'. I tried installing it on an 800MHz C3 system and it was unstable to the point of being unusable. I can't remember the exact details, something about the C3 missing one of the Pentium instructions.
Some of us do. Without the work of the Polish scientists on a captured Enigma machine the task at Bletchley Park would have been impossible. Perhaps we should educate the rest of the Slashdot readership.
Sorry guys, but the work at Yahoo doesn't come close to the efforts made at Bletchley Park to defeat the Germans. The teams at Bletchley were the finest British minds of a generation assembled to beat an evil empire whilst lives were at stake. Comparing this to a phoney war between two email applications is kinda insulting.
I'm in a data center right now with two rack mounted clusters and three IBM Z series machines plus a load of other kit. Without the raised flooring AND the ventilation systems things would get pretty toasty here but it has to be done right. The clusters are mounted in back to back Compaq network racks which draw air in the front and push it out the back. We therefore have 'cold' isles where the air is fed in through the raised floor and 'hot' isles where the hot air is taken away to help heat the rest of the building.
The only other option would be water cooling but that's viewed by my bosses as supercomputer territory.
1) A single graphical user environment. No more fights between KDE and Gnome, lock the two sets of developers together in a room and don't let them out until they produce a single unified product.
2) An easier install process. Windows users just click on install.exe or setup.exe but Linux users have to fight their way through apt get, rpm package management and unpacking tar files using obscure command lines. There should be no need for a user to manually unpack then compile source code, this is the 21st Century.
3) Decent power management on laptops. The state of ACPI under Linux is a disgrace and the developers responsible should be taken out and shot.
4) MS Office for Linux. I hate the evil empire just as much as the next Slashdot reader but MS Office is the standard, accept it.
If the IP 4 address space was properly allocated then we could probably get another ten years out of the system. We have for example BBN occupying three class A blocks and HP taking another two or three. Set against this is the continent of Africa which is assigned one block.
So long as you can get ACPI working on laptops I don't care if you're black, white, brown, yellow, green or pink with yellow spots. Just get it fixed, OK?
Let me save you the time and the money, it won't work. Three years ago my boss decided that the paperless office was the way to go and we spent a fortune on hardware.
1) Users complained about the extra work scanning incoming mail and invoices into the document management system.
2) Users still printed out paper copies of documents so that they could read them.
3) Despite a fortune spent on consultants auditors picked multiple holes in our system and almost refused to sign over the year-end accounts.
I forget who said it but the paperless office is about as likely as the paperless toilet, get used to it.
Ummm, what happened to 'Linux Secure By Design'? I'm not saying MS Windows is more secure here but maybe some of the pro-Linux stuff has been overdone a tad.
As an aid to workflow the following procedure will become effective as of Monday morning (20th March 2001).
From now on all requests for I.T. work in the accounts department have to be in submitted in triplicate on a new form, RFW1 (Request For Work V1) and signed by:
1) The person requiring the work 2) The Head of Accounts 3) The I.T. Director 4) The Financial or Managing Director
Work CANNOT take place until paperwork has been received in the I.T. department with all signatures in place.
One copy of the job sheet will be retained by the accounts department, one by the I.T. department and the third copy will be held in storage, just in case we need it. All applications for work done should be written clearly in copperplate handwriting (NOT typed) using a quill pen and black ink. Job sheets submitted in any other style of handwriting will not be accepted.
Requests for work should include the reason for the work, the cost centre(s) involved, serial numbers of all equipment requiring attention, colour of equipment, the exact location of the equipment in latitude and longtitude, any unusual smells that may be present and include a full estimate of time (rounded off to the nearest tenth of a second) and materials (estimates to the nearest penny will be acceptable). Where a desktop PC requires attention a full list of all files held on the hard disk should be printed out before the machine is touched.
If any parts are required then the accounts department are responsible for ordering them once I.T. give a specification. Any incorrect parts ordered or received will result in the job going to the back of the queue until other work has been dealt with.
Jobs will be dealt with on a strictly 'first come first served' basis between the hours of 0900 to 1200 & 1300 to 1700. Members of staff who require repair work should be present at all times whilst work is carried out.
Protective Personal Equipment (PPE) should be provided by the accounts department before work is carried out including overalls, hard hat and goggles. A clear working area of six feet six inches (two metres) should be available around any equipment requiring attention.
If any further materials are required to return the equipment to operation then work will cease until the entire paperwork has been submitted again, this time with the correct figures. If time other than that authorised is required then a TAA1 (Time Authorisation Authority V1) form should be filled out (using the usual copperplate handwriting but this time in green ink). Both items of paperwork MUST be signed by the members of Roberts Group management above.
On completion of the work the I.T. department will require the equipment to be soak tested for a minimum of 48 (forty eight) hours. As this represents a security risk the person requesting the work should be present throughout. Costs of sleeping bags and flasks of hot tea should be claimed on expenses through the usual channels.
The equipment will then be flash tested to four hundred volts to ensure safety.
Once soak testing has been completed to the satisfaction of I.T. department staff a Certificate of Conformity (in triplicate) will be issued. This should be signed by the following people before the equipment is brought back into service:
1) The person requiring the work 2) The Head of Accounts 3) The I.T. Director 4) The Financial or Managing Director 5) The member of I.T. staff carrying out the work
The users copy of the certificate should be displayed in a prominent position on the desk of the person using the equipment, with one copy returned to file (just in case) and the third copy collated with the original order requiring the work. If we are unable to collate a certificate of conformity with a properly formatted work order then the equipment that has been worke
Find either a physics or radio guy and ask them to explain about the inverse square law. Unless the transformer is underneath your house you need not worry.
Notebooks logon via a seperate server, they have their own IP address range whenever on the network and their own DHCP server. The link between the notebook servers and the rest of the network is firewalled.
"The letter coincided with a call from financial analyst house Credit Suisse First Boston for Novell to improve its vision, strategy, and execution in order to become a more profitable business."
OK, let's go through these one by one.
How does a company improve its 'vision'? We've all seen these lofty vision statements which mean nothing when put to the test.
I'll give you the second one. Any business deserves a strategy or a plan.
The final lofty goal, Novell should 'improve its execution'. I wonder who they will kill next?
This, ladies and gentlemen, is what happens when the world is run by accountants and MBAs.
The one thing I have never figured is how to replace a RAS (Remote Access Server) running under Windows. How DO windows users dial into a Samba network over the phone?
Slashdot Mirror
Giving away millions does not excuse you from Microsoft tactics such as:
1) EULAs that take away the users rights
2) Operating systems with little or no security
3) Business tactics that make the Borgias look like a kindergarden group.
5/10, try harder.
Ed Almos
The cook just turned up the burner another notch.
Ed Almos
1) Reset your BIOS to the default settings.
2) Check your hard disk(s) and make sure that they are spinning up OK by the time the BIOS finishes.
3) Check for services starting which address programs or hardware which may have been removed.
4) Swap the power supply.
5) Wipe the hard disk and (if you must use MS Windows) reinstall from scratch. I've seen machines from big manufacturers that had all sorts of weird problems which went away with a default install.
The above checks cost nothing but your time, but then there's option #6.
6) Buy a UPS.
The last place I worked at had a bonus scheme, the only problem was that performance levels were set impossibly high and the resulting bonus worked out at about 5% of your pay. I finally realized that it wasn't worth the stress, gray hair and ulcers so I just did my job and didn't bother busting a gut for little reward.
Here's a hint, if you want to setup a bonus scheme then ask your staff what they want as rewards.
Ed Almos
Looking at this from an engineering standpoint you have two problems to solve, and neither of them are easy:
1) You need to lock frame sync and line sync on all of your sources of video. If the frame sync is not locked then you will have a number of windows with 'rolling' pictures, if the line sync is not locked then a number of pictures will be unreadable.
2) You need to switch between your image sources cleanly and VERY quickly. At 800x600 a single line is scanned in 0.000030414 seconds (1/32880 Hz). Divide that by 800 and you can see that to generate a single pixel line between images needs a switching time of 0.000000038 seconds. All of this needs to be synchronized correctly with item (1) above.
Now you see why the commercial solutions are so expensive. Give me $5,000 and I'll build and debug one for you
Ed Almos
Your network
IP Address 192.168.2.x
Subnet Mask 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway (router) 192.168.1.1
Second Network
IP Address 192.168.3.x
Subnet Mask 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway (router) 192.168.1.1
Router Settings
IP Address 192.168.1.1
Subnet Mask 255.255.0.0
I think this would divide your network into two subnets with both subnets allowed to talk to the router, or am I nuts?
Ed Almos
By Austin Ekeinde
YENAGOA,Nigeria (Reuters) - A Nigerian state governor charged with money laundering in Britain has escaped disguised as a woman and returned to his home state, where he enjoys immunity from prosecution. The return of Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, governor of Bayelsa state in the oil-producing Niger Delta, deals a severe blow to President Olusegun Obasanjo's campaign to curb theft of public resources by some state governors.
"As he drove into town, the streets were lined with crowds of people waving white handkerchiefs and jubilating," said Oronto Douglas, a commissioner in the Bayelsa state government. "He came into government house, knelt down and prayed. Then he addressed thousands thanking the Ijaw people for bringing him back," he said from the Bayelsa state capital Yenagoa.
The Ijaw are the dominant ethnic group in the southern Niger Delta. Alamieyeseigha's detention in Britain was interpreted by many Ijaw as a slight on them as he is the only Ijaw among Nigeria's 36 state governors.
Nigeria's Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) said it would continue its investigation into Alamieyeseigha's financial dealings and would do whatever Nigerian law allowed to bring him to justice. "It's a tragedy, it's a challenge to us and to our justice system," EFCC Chairman Nuhu Ribadu told a news conference in the federal capital Abuja. "We know that he dressed as a woman. We know that he forged documents to gain entrance and pass through undetected both at the UK side and the Nigerian side," he said, adding that Alamieyeseigha had slipped into Nigeria on Sunday evening.
Alamieyeseigha had earlier told supporters in his home village of Amassoma in Bayelsa that the way he escaped was a "mystery" he would explain at the appropriate time.
A MILLION POUNDS IN CASH
Many of the governor's loyalists allege that he is being persecuted because of his allegiance to Vice President Atiku Abubakar, who is engaged in a fierce power struggle with Obasanjo ahead of the next presidential election in 2007. Asked about this allegation, Ribadu said the EFCC had no interest in politics, and being in politics was not a licence to steal public funds and then complain of persecution.
A British court charged Alamieyeseigha in September with laundering 1.8 million pounds and he was given bail on condition that he did not travel abroad. He had handed in his passport and a large bail bond to authorities in London.
During their investigation, UK police found 1 million pounds in cash in his London home.
Nigeria is ranked sixth most corrupt country in the world by independent watchdog Transparency International.
Obasanjo says his government is fighting corruption, and a handful of people in high places have lost their jobs or been charged. But critics say the anti-graft campaign targets only Obasanjo's opponents, leaving his allies undisturbed.
Alamieyeseigha's immunity from prosecution runs out when he steps down. His term ends in 2007.
He is the second Nigerian state governor to escape British justice after Joshua Dariye of Plateau state, who was under investigation for money laundering, returned home in 2004. He is now wanted by police.
I sure hope that they've fixed the VIA C3 bug that was present on the last distribution, 'Breezy Badger'. I tried installing it on an 800MHz C3 system and it was unstable to the point of being unusable. I can't remember the exact details, something about the C3 missing one of the Pentium instructions.
Ed Almos
Some of us do. Without the work of the Polish scientists on a captured Enigma machine the task at Bletchley Park would have been impossible. Perhaps we should educate the rest of the Slashdot readership.
Ed Almos
Sorry guys, but the work at Yahoo doesn't come close to the efforts made at Bletchley Park to defeat the Germans. The teams at Bletchley were the finest British minds of a generation assembled to beat an evil empire whilst lives were at stake. Comparing this to a phoney war between two email applications is kinda insulting.
Ed Almos
I'm in a data center right now with two rack mounted clusters and three IBM Z series machines plus a load of other kit. Without the raised flooring AND the ventilation systems things would get pretty toasty here but it has to be done right. The clusters are mounted in back to back Compaq network racks which draw air in the front and push it out the back. We therefore have 'cold' isles where the air is fed in through the raised floor and 'hot' isles where the hot air is taken away to help heat the rest of the building.
The only other option would be water cooling but that's viewed by my bosses as supercomputer territory.
Ed Almos
1) A single graphical user environment. No more fights between KDE and Gnome, lock the two sets of developers together in a room and don't let them out until they produce a single unified product.
2) An easier install process. Windows users just click on install.exe or setup.exe but Linux users have to fight their way through apt get, rpm package management and unpacking tar files using obscure command lines. There should be no need for a user to manually unpack then compile source code, this is the 21st Century.
3) Decent power management on laptops. The state of ACPI under Linux is a disgrace and the developers responsible should be taken out and shot.
4) MS Office for Linux. I hate the evil empire just as much as the next Slashdot reader but MS Office is the standard, accept it.
There will be extensive snowfalls throughout Hell and production of snowballs is expected to rise.
Ed Almos
I'm running Firefox 1.0.7 under Ubuntu. When I click on the link firefox exits, am I the only one having this problem?
Ed Almos
If the IP 4 address space was properly allocated then we could probably get another ten years out of the system. We have for example BBN occupying three class A blocks and HP taking another two or three. Set against this is the continent of Africa which is assigned one block.
Ed Almos
So long as you can get ACPI working on laptops I don't care if you're black, white, brown, yellow, green or pink with yellow spots. Just get it fixed, OK?
Ed Almos
Let me save you the time and the money, it won't work. Three years ago my boss decided that the paperless office was the way to go and we spent a fortune on hardware.
1) Users complained about the extra work scanning incoming mail and invoices into the document management system.
2) Users still printed out paper copies of documents so that they could read them.
3) Despite a fortune spent on consultants auditors picked multiple holes in our system and almost refused to sign over the year-end accounts.
I forget who said it but the paperless office is about as likely as the paperless toilet, get used to it.
Ed Almos
Ummm, what happened to 'Linux Secure By Design'? I'm not saying MS Windows is more secure here but maybe some of the pro-Linux stuff has been overdone a tad.
Ed Almos
Gentlemen
They say that revenge is a dish best served cold.
Yours in jest
Ed
For the Attention of the Accounts Department
As an aid to workflow the following procedure will become effective as of Monday morning (20th March 2001).
From now on all requests for I.T. work in the accounts department have to be in submitted in triplicate on a new form, RFW1 (Request For Work V1) and signed by:
1) The person requiring the work
2) The Head of Accounts
3) The I.T. Director
4) The Financial or Managing Director
Work CANNOT take place until paperwork has been received in the I.T. department with all signatures in place.
One copy of the job sheet will be retained by the accounts department, one by the I.T. department and the third copy will be held in storage, just in case we need it. All applications for work done should be written clearly in copperplate handwriting (NOT typed) using a quill pen and black ink. Job sheets submitted in any other style of handwriting will not be accepted.
Requests for work should include the reason for the work, the cost centre(s) involved, serial numbers of all equipment requiring attention, colour of equipment, the exact location of the equipment in latitude and longtitude, any unusual smells that may be present and include a full estimate of time (rounded off to the nearest tenth of a second) and materials (estimates to the nearest penny will be acceptable). Where a desktop PC requires attention a full list of all files held on the hard disk should be printed out before the machine is touched.
If any parts are required then the accounts department are responsible for ordering them once I.T. give a specification. Any incorrect parts ordered or received will result in the job going to the back of the queue until other work has been dealt with.
Jobs will be dealt with on a strictly 'first come first served' basis between the hours of 0900 to 1200 & 1300 to 1700. Members of staff who require repair work should be present at all times whilst work is carried out.
Protective Personal Equipment (PPE) should be provided by the accounts department before work is carried out including overalls, hard hat and goggles. A clear working area of six feet six inches (two metres) should be available around any equipment requiring attention.
If any further materials are required to return the equipment to operation then work will cease until the entire paperwork has been submitted again, this time with the correct figures. If time other than that authorised is required then a TAA1 (Time Authorisation Authority V1) form should be filled out (using the usual copperplate handwriting but this time in green ink). Both items of paperwork MUST be signed by the members of Roberts Group management above.
On completion of the work the I.T. department will require the equipment to be soak tested for a minimum of 48 (forty eight) hours. As this represents a security risk the person requesting the work should be present throughout. Costs of sleeping bags and flasks of hot tea should be claimed on expenses through the usual channels.
The equipment will then be flash tested to four hundred volts to ensure safety.
Once soak testing has been completed to the satisfaction of I.T. department staff a Certificate of Conformity (in triplicate) will be issued. This should be signed by the following people before the equipment is brought back into service:
1) The person requiring the work
2) The Head of Accounts
3) The I.T. Director
4) The Financial or Managing Director
5) The member of I.T. staff carrying out the work
The users copy of the certificate should be displayed in a prominent position on the desk of the person using the equipment, with one copy returned to file (just in case) and the third copy collated with the original order requiring the work. If we are unable to collate a certificate of conformity with a properly formatted work order then the equipment that has been worke
Find either a physics or radio guy and ask them to explain about the inverse square law. Unless the transformer is underneath your house you need not worry.
Ed Almos
Notebooks logon via a seperate server, they have their own IP address range whenever on the network and their own DHCP server. The link between the notebook servers and the rest of the network is firewalled.
Ed Almos
Budapest, Hungary
"The letter coincided with a call from financial analyst house Credit Suisse First Boston for Novell to improve its vision, strategy, and execution in order to become a more profitable business."
OK, let's go through these one by one.
How does a company improve its 'vision'? We've all seen these lofty vision statements which mean nothing when put to the test.
I'll give you the second one. Any business deserves a strategy or a plan.
The final lofty goal, Novell should 'improve its execution'. I wonder who they will kill next?
This, ladies and gentlemen, is what happens when the world is run by accountants and MBAs.
Ed Almos
Budapest, Hungary
The one thing I have never figured is how to replace a RAS (Remote Access Server) running under Windows. How DO windows users dial into a Samba network over the phone?
Ed Almos
Don't forget those anti-static mats and wrist straps.
Ed Almos
My old HP-65 Calculator. Real keys, an LED display instead of an LCD, and the ability to program the thing using magnetic cards.
And of course, it used RPN.
Ed Almos
Budapest, Hungary