Sorry to burst your bubble but this started a couple of weeks ago. We got back from the Christmas break to find one of the letters from the SCO Group asking us to verify that we had not copied any code from our SCO servers into Linux machines.
As our last SCO server went into the trash a couple of years ago legal told us to ignore the letter and that's exactly what we did. Our three AIX machines continue to run as do our two Linux clusters, the only thing that's changed is the FUD from SCO.
Maybe IT is CS Lite but if a CS graduate applies for a job as Deputy IT Manager I would expect them to know a LITTLE bit about the hardware used in day-to-day business.
2) PC Hardware Architecture. ISA/PCI, CPU Architecture, Video systems.
3) Comms. ASDL, Modems, Firewire, USB.
I've actually come across a recent Computer Science graduate who didn't know the difference between a PCI slot video card and an AGP card yet he could talk forever about CPU architectures. He didn't get the job.
OK, if you're into home automation as much as I am then here are some ideas. Please note that not all of them are realistic at this time but technology is always improving.
1) Full climate management on a per-room basis. If it's too hot in a room the system turns up the AC, too cold it opens a radiator valve or turns on the underfloor heating, too bright it closes the blinds/drapes.
2) Intruder detection, link individual room alarms to cameras and record the pictures digitally.
3) Voice control of all functions. Imagine walking into a room and saying 'increase lights by fifty percent and it happens.
4) A home phone system combined with an intercom.
I started my tech career reading Circuit Cellar and that gave me lots of ideas (thanks Steve), if you ever find a collection of the Circuit Cellar books then snap them up because you will be prying mine from my cold dead fingers.
Three AIX servers, thirty six Linux servers in two clusters, one happy team of system admins. If SCO ever come calling here they will be escorted from the building to the sound of our laughter.
I'm assuming here that it's kinda dark inside the earth, at least it was the last time I went down a cave. They must have used a rather large flashgun.
I don't care what a company promises, so long as they KEEP those promises.
A good example of this is Google who right from the start have followed an ethical policy because of the beliefs of the two guys who founded the company.
Another example (but this time of lack of ethics) are companies like Yahoo who change the terms and conditions at the drop of a hat then expect the users to follow.
Maybe the CEO of a company should be forced to take ethics 101 once a year to make sure they fly straight.
No, you haven't got it wrong, this is EXACTLY what I am looking for. Some sort of wrapper around the shutdown command which looks for active NFS shares before shutting down the system.
When I saw this I was wondering if it is a windows or a hardware problem. What happens for example if he boots using a Knoppix CD, can he see the CDROM then ?
Being able to boot and work off MSDOS is just a basic confidence test and once you load up something a bit more meaty things sometimes start to go wrong. Some other thoughts:
Bad batch of motherboards or IDE cables ?
Bad batch of power supplies or very cheap PSUs that can't handle the load? I've seen REAL flaky things happen when a power supply goes bad.
As I count myself as a member of the Hardware Geek Guild I feel your pain. When we moved into our apartment I built a unit out of timber stock that contained ten box files mounted horizontally. Box files make great (cheap) storage boxes and the eventual result is reasonably neat.
Cables are sorted into different types and then stored in supermarket carrier bags behind the cupboards. Use a permanent marker to write the cable type on the bag.
Books are stored on the bookshelves (duh!!)
Consider rack mounting your gear, it avoids various boxes all over the place and keeps the cable runs short.
One final note that may be of use for those geeks who live with a significant other. Store all your stuff in one place and then hide it behind a pair of double doors / cupboard fronts / curtains. This will help reserve the peace.
you do not get any wetter running in the rain rather than walking. They proved this on a British TV science show a few years back by making a group of (volunteer) kids either walk across the school yard or run whilst wearing cotton t-shirts. As it was in England it was of course raining.
At the end of the trip they weighed all of the shirts and there was no difference.
As for urinating on the third rail, at your own risk !! I would not like to try as the third rail here in Budapest is at 6,000 volts.
OK, we've all heard the joke about Microsoft being a car and having to press the horn, flash the lights and open the drivers door to reset. I reckon it's about time the tables were turned:
And if Linux was a car:
1) It would come as a kit along with a copy of CAR HOWTO which would be six months out of date.
2) You would also get three steering wheels and five headlights as part of the standard installation then be expected to pick which ones you wanted to use. There would be constant flame wars between the users of leather steering wheels and the users of the plastic variety.
3) Due to its excessive size the car would not fit into a standard car parking bay and it would be up to the new owner to trim bits off until it could fit.
4) The car would not use a standard radio wiring harness unless you patched the engine compartment using WIRING.TAR.GZ which would only be available by download from the manufacturers website.
5) Support for the linux car would be available from either the car manufacturer (after taking out a maintenance contract and paying a fee) or by logging onto alt.linux.car.problems where every request for assistance would be met with 'RTFM !! V4|\|C3D l3e+$peA| i$ whEn J00 +4lK L1K3 t|-|15. t0 u|\|d3r$+@|\|D jOo |\/|u5+ be lEET. 1f J00 4r3 NO+ lEe+ jOO C@|\|N0T 5p3A| 0r ReAd +|-|I5
6) Adding accessories to the car would be a nightmare. For example you could not add a pair of foglights on the front unless you had the following 'libraries' installed in your car. bumper.lib.1_6_483865 electrics.lib_3_RH_9_ 35 controls.lib.14_6_99 If an attempt to run your foglights without these libraries were to be made (or the libraries were a different version) your foglights MIGHT work but if they didn't there would be no support as the maintainer of electrics.lib_3_RH_9_35 can no longer be found.
7) You could only use your car with a trailer if you rebuilt the engine, this time with support for your model of trailer.
8) Your car would be of doubtful heritage. Parts of the design would be claimed by Novell, other sections would be (C) The Open Linux Group and SCO will lay claim to the whole concept and demand $699 for continued use. One guy in Finland would claim that he designed the whole thing and Richard Stallman would claim that your car is really called GNU Car.
9) Your car would take over five minutes to start. Faster starting methods would be available but be more unreliable, for example the brakes might not work after you start.
10) There would be no warning lights on the car dashboard. All warnings concerning oil, water, lighting and general failures would be written to the/var/log/ directory where the driver and passenger can read them when they pull over and park.
11) Additional storage could be achieved by using a roofrack, but the roofrack would be invisible until the driver issued the command 'mount -t/dev/roofrack/roof'. There would be problems unless the driver used the command 'umount/roof' before unscrewing the roofrack. Not all roofracks would work and some would just come back with the message 'roofrack is not a roof device' when issued with the mount command (and still remain invisible).
I am not a scientist I'm an I.T. Contractor and more than once I have refused to work in defense plants. Yes, it has meant that once in a while the gap between contracts has been a little longer but I still manage to sleep at nights.
I will not work on products that are used to kill people. Period.
Flying cars, wristwatch videophones, people walking around in shiny plastic suits all the same design, the Starship Enterprise, site to site matter transportation, the end of money, the end of war, the end of disease...................
Here we are running half a dozen AIX machines plus a couple of Linux clusters with 32 nodes each, which means that the invoice from SCO should land with quite a thud. When it arrives I'll pass it on to my four-year old daughter who needs plenty of paper when using her crayons.
I might send it back so that the SCO execs can have a nice picture of a penguin to hang on the wall, then again, I like my daughter's pictures.
There is always one movie moment that will stick in my mind. Laura Dern is sitting in the jeep looking at a leaf and Sam Neal forces her head round to look at two dinosaurs feeding off the tops of trees. Those two 'animals' looked so real on the movie screen that I knew from that point on that things would never be the same.
Get yerself over to www.linuxprinting.org and have a good read. An awful lot of the multi-function devices are listed as 'doorstops', in other words they will NOT work under linux. I've found through experience that a lot of these machines are windows only.
The first time I ever saw a Hungarian keyboard I made a mental note never ever to use one again. Only the 'Z' and 'Y' are swapped in the letters but everything else is all over the place. I once spent ten minutes in a Budapest internet cafe trying to find the '@' symbol so that I could send an e-mail.
You have three alternatives. Either find a friend in the right country who is willing to ship the keyboards surface freight, or go there on vacation, or (as I did) bring a good supply of keyboards with you when you move countries. I'm still using a Compaq Easy Access keyboard with USA layout and I have three more in the closet when this one dies or the girlfriend spills nail polish on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry to burst your bubble but this started a couple of weeks ago. We got back from the Christmas break to find one of the letters from the SCO Group asking us to verify that we had not copied any code from our SCO servers into Linux machines.
As our last SCO server went into the trash a couple of years ago legal told us to ignore the letter and that's exactly what we did. Our three AIX machines continue to run as do our two Linux clusters, the only thing that's changed is the FUD from SCO.
Ed Almos
Budapest, Hungary
Maybe IT is CS Lite but if a CS graduate applies for a job as Deputy IT Manager I would expect them to know a LITTLE bit about the hardware used in day-to-day business.
Ed
Software wise I can't fault your course, but there appears to be little if anything about computer hardware.
1) Network hardware. Hubs, switches, routers, firewalls.
2) PC Hardware Architecture. ISA/PCI, CPU Architecture, Video systems.
3) Comms. ASDL, Modems, Firewire, USB.
I've actually come across a recent Computer Science graduate who didn't know the difference between a PCI slot video card and an AGP card yet he could talk forever about CPU architectures. He didn't get the job.
OK, if you're into home automation as much as I am then here are some ideas. Please note that not all of them are realistic at this time but technology is always improving.
1) Full climate management on a per-room basis. If it's too hot in a room the system turns up the AC, too cold it opens a radiator valve or turns on the underfloor heating, too bright it closes the blinds/drapes.
2) Intruder detection, link individual room alarms to cameras and record the pictures digitally.
3) Voice control of all functions. Imagine walking into a room and saying 'increase lights by fifty percent and it happens.
4) A home phone system combined with an intercom.
I started my tech career reading Circuit Cellar and that gave me lots of ideas (thanks Steve), if you ever find a collection of the Circuit Cellar books then snap them up because you will be prying mine from my cold dead fingers.
Ed Almos
Budapest, Hungary
360K download and 64K upload ADSL costs me 13,625 Hungarian Forint per month. At the current exchange rate that's a shade over $64.40 per month.
Ed Almos
Budapest, Hungary
Three AIX servers, thirty six Linux servers in two clusters, one happy team of system admins. If SCO ever come calling here they will be escorted from the building to the sound of our laughter.
Ed
THANK YOU !! A million times thank you from the bottom of my heart !!
My local ISP uses a flash advertisement at the top of their home page and I have been clicking 'no' on that damn flash request for the last two years.
Sir, you are a gentleman and a scholar. May Natalie Portman cater to your every need until your dying day.
Ed Almos
I'm assuming here that it's kinda dark inside the earth, at least it was the last time I went down a cave. They must have used a rather large flashgun.
Ed
I don't care what a company promises, so long as they KEEP those promises.
A good example of this is Google who right from the start have followed an ethical policy because of the beliefs of the two guys who founded the company.
Another example (but this time of lack of ethics) are companies like Yahoo who change the terms and conditions at the drop of a hat then expect the users to follow.
Maybe the CEO of a company should be forced to take ethics 101 once a year to make sure they fly straight.
Ed
No, you haven't got it wrong, this is EXACTLY what I am looking for. Some sort of wrapper around the shutdown command which looks for active NFS shares before shutting down the system.
Ed
When I saw this I was wondering if it is a windows or a hardware problem. What happens for example if he boots using a Knoppix CD, can he see the CDROM then ?
Being able to boot and work off MSDOS is just a basic confidence test and once you load up something a bit more meaty things sometimes start to go wrong. Some other thoughts:
Bad batch of motherboards or IDE cables ?
Bad batch of power supplies or very cheap PSUs that can't handle the load? I've seen REAL flaky things happen when a power supply goes bad.
Virus or worm ?
This could be an interesting challenge.
Ed Almos
As I count myself as a member of the Hardware Geek Guild I feel your pain. When we moved into our apartment I built a unit out of timber stock that contained ten box files mounted horizontally. Box files make great (cheap) storage boxes and the eventual result is reasonably neat.
Cables are sorted into different types and then stored in supermarket carrier bags behind the cupboards. Use a permanent marker to write the cable type on the bag.
Books are stored on the bookshelves (duh!!)
Consider rack mounting your gear, it avoids various boxes all over the place and keeps the cable runs short.
One final note that may be of use for those geeks who live with a significant other. Store all your stuff in one place and then hide it behind a pair of double doors / cupboard fronts / curtains. This will help reserve the peace.
Ed Almos
you do not get any wetter running in the rain rather than walking. They proved this on a British TV science show a few years back by making a group of (volunteer) kids either walk across the school yard or run whilst wearing cotton t-shirts. As it was in England it was of course raining.
At the end of the trip they weighed all of the shirts and there was no difference.
As for urinating on the third rail, at your own risk !! I would not like to try as the third rail here in Budapest is at 6,000 volts.
Ed Almos
Does anybody have the eclipse times for Europe ?
Ed Almos
Budapest, Hungary
OK, we've all heard the joke about Microsoft being a car and having to press the horn, flash the lights and open the drivers door to reset. I reckon it's about time the tables were turned:
_ 35
/var/log/ directory where the driver and passenger can read them when they pull over and park.
/dev/roofrack /roof'. There would be problems unless the driver used the command 'umount /roof' before unscrewing the roofrack. Not all roofracks would work and some would just come back with the message 'roofrack is not a roof device' when issued with the mount command (and still remain invisible).
And if Linux was a car:
1) It would come as a kit along with a copy of CAR HOWTO which would be six months out of date.
2) You would also get three steering wheels and five headlights as part of the standard installation then be expected to pick which ones you wanted to use. There would be constant flame wars between the users of leather steering wheels and the users of the plastic variety.
3) Due to its excessive size the car would not fit into a standard car parking bay and it would be up to the new owner to trim bits off until it could fit.
4) The car would not use a standard radio wiring harness unless you patched the engine compartment using WIRING.TAR.GZ which would only be available by download from the manufacturers website.
5) Support for the linux car would be available from either the car manufacturer (after taking out a maintenance contract and paying a fee) or by logging onto alt.linux.car.problems where every request for assistance would be met with 'RTFM !! V4|\|C3D l3e+$peA| i$ whEn J00 +4lK L1K3 t|-|15. t0 u|\|d3r$+@|\|D jOo |\/|u5+ be lEET. 1f J00 4r3 NO+ lEe+ jOO C@|\|N0T 5p3A| 0r ReAd +|-|I5
6) Adding accessories to the car would be a nightmare. For example you could not add a pair of foglights on the front unless you had the following 'libraries' installed in your car.
bumper.lib.1_6_483865
electrics.lib_3_RH_9
controls.lib.14_6_99
If an attempt to run your foglights without these libraries were to be made (or the libraries were a different version) your foglights MIGHT work but if they didn't there would be no support as the maintainer of electrics.lib_3_RH_9_35 can no longer be found.
7) You could only use your car with a trailer if you rebuilt the engine, this time with support for your model of trailer.
8) Your car would be of doubtful heritage. Parts of the design would be claimed by Novell, other sections would be (C) The Open Linux Group and SCO will lay claim to the whole concept and demand $699 for continued use. One guy in Finland would claim that he designed the whole thing and Richard Stallman would claim that your car is really called GNU Car.
9) Your car would take over five minutes to start. Faster starting methods would be available but be more unreliable, for example the brakes might not work after you start.
10) There would be no warning lights on the car dashboard. All warnings concerning oil, water, lighting and general failures would be written to the
11) Additional storage could be achieved by using a roofrack, but the roofrack would be invisible until the driver issued the command 'mount -t
Any more ?
Ed Almos
My ex-wife's heart.
Me ? Bitter ? Nah !!
I am not a scientist I'm an I.T. Contractor and more than once I have refused to work in defense plants. Yes, it has meant that once in a while the gap between contracts has been a little longer but I still manage to sleep at nights.
I will not work on products that are used to kill people. Period.
Ed Almos
No
Ed Almos & Cath Ellerman
Flying cars, wristwatch videophones, people walking around in shiny plastic suits all the same design, the Starship Enterprise, site to site matter transportation, the end of money, the end of war, the end of disease ...................
I'll settle for the flying car.
Ed Almos
No, in the UK they have these things called 'toilets'. They perform the same function so visitors from the USA need not worry.
EA
No, but by God I am waiting with baited breath.
Here we are running half a dozen AIX machines plus a couple of Linux clusters with 32 nodes each, which means that the invoice from SCO should land with quite a thud. When it arrives I'll pass it on to my four-year old daughter who needs plenty of paper when using her crayons.
I might send it back so that the SCO execs can have a nice picture of a penguin to hang on the wall, then again, I like my daughter's pictures.
Ed Almos
Proud Father & Proud Linux User
There is always one movie moment that will stick in my mind. Laura Dern is sitting in the jeep looking at a leaf and Sam Neal forces her head round to look at two dinosaurs feeding off the tops of trees. Those two 'animals' looked so real on the movie screen that I knew from that point on that things would never be the same.
Ed Almos
Get yerself over to www.linuxprinting.org and have a good read. An awful lot of the multi-function devices are listed as 'doorstops', in other words they will NOT work under linux. I've found through experience that a lot of these machines are windows only.
Ed Almos
You do the job on your own, and after touching the wrong pair of wires you end up with 220 volts from armpit to armpit.
Slow cooking in your own body fat is not a nice way to die my son. Walk away from this one and get an electrician in.
Ed Almos
The first time I ever saw a Hungarian keyboard I made a mental note never ever to use one again. Only the 'Z' and 'Y' are swapped in the letters but everything else is all over the place. I once spent ten minutes in a Budapest internet cafe trying to find the '@' symbol so that I could send an e-mail.
You have three alternatives. Either find a friend in the right country who is willing to ship the keyboards surface freight, or go there on vacation, or (as I did) bring a good supply of keyboards with you when you move countries. I'm still using a Compaq Easy Access keyboard with USA layout and I have three more in the closet when this one dies or the girlfriend spills nail polish on it.
Ed Almos