How likely is it that people who didn't preorder will get a copy? Should I even bother to try yet, or should I wait for the next pressing or what ever of CD's?
My roommate ran over to CompUSA (Austin, TX) and picked up two copies earlier this afternoon. He said that they had plenty left. YMMV
Richard Roundtree makes an appearance as "Uncle Shaft" from what I hear... Awesome.
Yep. He's there as "Uncle John".
And if you notice the old guy playing chess in the bar scene that Jackson calls "Mr. P" is none other than Gordon Parks, the director of the original movie.
I used wreq at my last job. It was used as a site trouble ticket system and we were planning on replacing it with something more powerful, but I left the company before management decided on a new system. Wreq served the company well for a couple of years
I'm still in high-school, but it sounds like there is a serious lack of UNIX workers. Not only in your post, but in other ones as well, it sounds like there are plenty of NT guys to work with the Microsoft stuff, but that it would be hard to replace a UNIX guy. How true is that?
Finding UNIX people is always harder, but I think a lot depends on the market you're in. When I was in Wichita, KS, I was the UNIX guy for a good size company. Pretty much everyone else worked on the mainframe or did deskside support. Finding someone to replace me was a lot more difficult that finding a mainframe or NT guy.
However, since I've moved to Austin, TX, I've noticed that there are a lot more UNIX literate people around. The dotcoms I've worked for have all been Linux/Solaris based, at least on the back end.
Still, it's a lot harder to find good Unix admin's and system programmers. It seems like everyone and his duck has an MCSE. One thing I've noticed, though, is that the ones who have the MCSE did it as a career move; the ones who do UNIX learned it cause it was fun.
CCVS was written by the guys at Hell's Kitchen Software which is now owned by RedHat. It's available for several OSen.
We use it at the dotcom where I work and it works pretty well. There are APIs for C, Java, Perl, PHP and Python and TCL. They guy who set ours up pretty much used their example code, grabbed the socket server code from the Perl Cookbook, added a few queries to our Oracle database and was good to go.
From what I hear, the support is pretty good as he's needed to call them a couple of times. I'm now supporting the software and I certainly haven't had any problems
Again, I think it's high time folks looked into alternative registrars since it seems Network Solutions is rapidly losing what limited respect it had among the Internet Community.
They've always been a bunch of bozos. Their service is actually greatly improved over what it was five years ago. Remember when they started "automating" their handling of domain registration/change forms? What a mess!
A friend used to say, "I'd rather be lucky than good" when talking about this business. Ain't that the truth?
The ones I've been involved with, ACLUG, which I helped found, and CTLUG, have a small "core" of two to four people very active in keeping the thing runing, organizing meetings, etc. I've never seen a LUG where there were elected officers, but that doesn't mean that you couldn't do it that way.
I think the whole open source mindset leads itself to groups like these. The Austin Perl Mongers run pretty much the same way as most LUGs I've seen. These people are more interested in learning and spreading the word than they are concerned about what the organization looks like.
Last place I worked we had over a hundred mailing lists and only around 200 employees. Admittedly, many were for use by users of the website, but there was almost always a list for each project going on (and usually two or three.)
The worst part was the admin work dealing with these lists. When the first few lists were set up, no one had any idea how fast the number of lists would grow. Only the sysadmins could create/make changes to the lists and there were no automated tools to add new employees to the correct lists, remove terminated employees, etc. Lots of time wasted by the admins when they could have been doing things to make everyone's lives easier.
So my suggestion to your IT director would be to set something up like MajorCool where the users can create and manage their own lists. Even if you only need one today, you're gonna need more tomorrow. 'cause someday HR is gonna figure out that they really don't want contractors seeing mail about benefits that is sent to the everyone list and demand another one. And it just gets worse from there.
I know there was a question about the higher prices of VA boxes compared to other competitors (and I read it too). Sometimes appalingly higher. I'm wondering, is there anyone out there who has bought some VA servers and found that the added "services" touted make up for the price. Is it, or was it worth it to you?
We've started using VA boxen at work. We stuck one of their 2x2 servers in our web rotation and tried to beat it to death. We hit it with 2x and then 4x the traffic that our normal servers would get. The box just kept humming along.
The Mayor Daemon stuff looks like it's a major win too. Being able to redirect the console output from a machine at a co-loc facility back to your desktop can make life a lot easier.
And I must say, after meeting our local VA rep, if the rest are like him, they have got to have some of the best service out there.
Surely Deja has the volume to absorb a slashdotting. Their servers seem to have ground to a halt.
Fixed now. The original link was to the article on one specific server. It was getting hammered. I called and had them change the link to the round robin www.deja.com and all is well.
Where did you hear that from? Everything I've heard says that they lose money just like most other tech IPO companies. Wasn't there an article on/. about SuSe bragging that they actually turned a profit as compared to Redhat bleeding money?
I wouldn't exactly call it bleeding money. The ratio of their losses to their earnings is pretty small. They could easily become profitable by cutting costs and slowing growth, but they are much more interested in growing the business right now.
Are you on the RC5 team? Current theory is that they pulled it from there-apparently that's happened before I'm not on the Slashdot RC5 team and I got the spam. I am however on another RC5 team. Did they send it to everyone who's doing RC5?
I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that SETI@home's half million participants are currently being assigned the same 115 work units over and over again, all from three different sky locations collected on January 7 and 8. If anyone has seen any other work units recently -- especially from January 9 or later -- please speak up.
According to their web page, they are having problems with their "data pipeline" and that they hope to have it "fixed shortly".
Does anyone have experience with SWBell in Austin? I've heard that if you use them as an ISP, you're asking for really bad latency... in the 800ms range. But they are CHEAP - $10/month compared to $20 at texas.net and $30 at jump point. I suppose this is a case of getting what you pay for, but... anyone have a GOOD experience w/ swbell?
I saw a couple of traceroutes posted on one of the Austin newsgroups and the latency looked really bad. Maybe not 800ms, but much worse than ISDN. I've heard really good stuff about Jump Point's service. They really seem to have it together. Now if SWB would just fix the pair gain problem in our neighborhood.
The CAD stuff my users do wouldn't even begin to run on NT. Without a distributed file system and a server farm, they would spend 90% of their time waiting for their sims and rendering to finish.
A lot of the engineers have no clue how the apps should be installed. So they are set up in DFS. They have no idea how their machines should be set up, so we have an image that we can push out to any one of our 2400 machines.
So now our users can concentrate on designing their chips and making the company money instead of playing with the way the tools and machines are set up. They get to do what they do well and don't have to worry about the environment.
Houston at number 26? My apartment complex wires Ethernet right into the units. Show me another city that has that!
Several places in Austin have ethernet net connections available. The place my roommate used to live was setting their's up right before he bought his house. This was a year and a half ago.
Now if they would fix the pair gain problem in our neighborhood so we can replace our ISDN with DSL.
Enrollment may be up, but graduation is down according to the article. If this is true, this poses an even more interesting question: Why are more students failing or switching majors?
In my experience, the demand for tech workers is so great that businesses are hiring a lot of underclassmen. The companies throw money at anyone who seems to have the slightest bit of talent.
I've never gotten around to removing my resume from my outdated web page at my old college. I still get hits from people wanting to hire me for this and that.
The problem WAS the future
on
Why Kids Kill
·
· Score: 1
Before you flame read on. I think the framers of the Constitution simply couldn't comprehend what some laws might come to mean in the future. I would seriously doubt they would haveadvocated regular citizens owning enough firepower to blow up a school. Remember what a gun meant in those days, a musket, with a reloading time of what, a minute or two? Contrast that with what we have today and there is a change in weaponry power of such a magnitude that no ruler in his right mind would allow a normal citizen to own it, much less have a guaranteed right to own it.
A musket was top of the line military hardware back in the 1760s. And I think they knew exactly what they were doing.
Funny you should mention that no ruler in his right mind would allow a normal citizen to own it. That's just what the Second Amendment was designed to prevent. The former colonies fought hard for their freedom and the Second was part of the designed as a way to fight to keep it, from all enemies, foreign and domestic.
A previous poster said that guns should be heavily regulated because they serve no other purposethan killing. I agree with that fully. Some people may be using firearms for sports, but the primary goal of firing a gun is still killing. We don't need to be able to kill (and if I remember correctly, the law even prohibits it in most countries;). So why should a normal person be allowed to carry a gun?
How about self defense? The police in the US aren't required to protect you from criminals. Most times they only arrive in time to clean up the mess. And, unfortunately, there are cases in this country where you need firearms to protect yourself from the police.
Yes, handguns, assault rifles and the like are designed for one thing: causing phyiscal harm to human beings. But causing harm is sometimes necessary. In the US we have a right to self defense (and here in Texas, we have a right to defend our property.)
you mean like "A gun in the home is X times more likelyto be used on a fammily member than on an intruder"
Man, that study was so bad, I can't believe it actually was accepted into the New England Journal of Medicine.
When John Lott looked into those statistics he found that they didn't even ask if it was the gun kept in the home that was used. He found that no more than 4% of the killings could be attributed to the gun kept in the home.
The problem IS BAD people with GUNS.
on
Why Kids Kill
·
· Score: 1
Think how different the situation at Littleton, CO would have been with a couple of well trained gun owners incapacitating the killers.
It's happened before. The school shootings in Pearl, Miss. was stopped by an assistant principal when he retrieved a handgun from his car and disarmed the shooter.
The Colorado Senate was debating a concealed carry law just this week, but it has been shelved since the tradgedy in Littleton. Of course, the law (like most other CHL laws) had a provision to prevent concealed carry on school property. How much you want to bet the CHL law won't pass at all now?
Slashdot Mirror
How likely is it that people who didn't preorder will get a copy? Should I even bother to try yet, or should I wait for the next pressing or what ever of CD's?
My roommate ran over to CompUSA (Austin, TX) and picked up two copies earlier this afternoon. He said that they had plenty left. YMMV
Richard Roundtree makes an appearance as "Uncle Shaft" from what I hear... Awesome.
Yep. He's there as "Uncle John".
And if you notice the old guy playing chess in the bar scene that Jackson calls "Mr. P" is none other than Gordon Parks, the director of the original movie.
You mean the good old, "I surrender! Here's my daughter"?
I used wreq at my last job. It was used as a site trouble ticket system and we were planning on replacing it with something more powerful, but I left the company before management decided on a new system. Wreq served the company well for a couple of years
Strong points:- Open source, change it to suit your liking.
- Easy to integrate into other systems
- Simple email interface.
- Fast
Weak points:I'm still in high-school, but it sounds like there is a serious lack of UNIX workers. Not only in your post, but in other ones as well, it sounds like there are plenty of NT guys to work with the Microsoft stuff, but that it would be hard to replace a UNIX guy. How true is that?
Finding UNIX people is always harder, but I think a lot depends on the market you're in. When I was in Wichita, KS, I was the UNIX guy for a good size company. Pretty much everyone else worked on the mainframe or did deskside support. Finding someone to replace me was a lot more difficult that finding a mainframe or NT guy.
However, since I've moved to Austin, TX, I've noticed that there are a lot more UNIX literate people around. The dotcoms I've worked for have all been Linux/Solaris based, at least on the back end.
Still, it's a lot harder to find good Unix admin's and system programmers. It seems like everyone and his duck has an MCSE. One thing I've noticed, though, is that the ones who have the MCSE did it as a career move; the ones who do UNIX learned it cause it was fun.
CCVS was written by the guys at Hell's Kitchen Software which is now owned by RedHat. It's available for several OSen.
We use it at the dotcom where I work and it works pretty well. There are APIs for C, Java, Perl, PHP and Python and TCL. They guy who set ours up pretty much used their example code, grabbed the socket server code from the Perl Cookbook, added a few queries to our Oracle database and was good to go.
From what I hear, the support is pretty good as he's needed to call them a couple of times. I'm now supporting the software and I certainly haven't had any problems
Again, I think it's high time folks looked into alternative registrars since it seems Network Solutions is rapidly losing what limited respect it had among the Internet Community.
They've always been a bunch of bozos. Their service is actually greatly improved over what it was five years ago. Remember when they started "automating" their handling of domain registration/change forms? What a mess!
A friend used to say, "I'd rather be lucky than good" when talking about this business. Ain't that the truth?
The ones I've been involved with, ACLUG, which I helped found, and CTLUG, have a small "core" of two to four people very active in keeping the thing runing, organizing meetings, etc. I've never seen a LUG where there were elected officers, but that doesn't mean that you couldn't do it that way.
I think the whole open source mindset leads itself to groups like these. The Austin Perl Mongers run pretty much the same way as most LUGs I've seen. These people are more interested in learning and spreading the word than they are concerned about what the organization looks like.
Last place I worked we had over a hundred mailing lists and only around 200 employees. Admittedly, many were for use by users of the website, but there was almost always a list for each project going on (and usually two or three.)
The worst part was the admin work dealing with these lists. When the first few lists were set up, no one had any idea how fast the number of lists would grow. Only the sysadmins could create/make changes to the lists and there were no automated tools to add new employees to the correct lists, remove terminated employees, etc. Lots of time wasted by the admins when they could have been doing things to make everyone's lives easier.
So my suggestion to your IT director would be to set something up like MajorCool where the users can create and manage their own lists. Even if you only need one today, you're gonna need more tomorrow. 'cause someday HR is gonna figure out that they really don't want contractors seeing mail about benefits that is sent to the everyone list and demand another one. And it just gets worse from there.
There is a web based gant chart application out there that is functional if a little basic and a Qt based application which I haven't tried.
We've started using VA boxen at work. We stuck one of their 2x2 servers in our web rotation and tried to beat it to death. We hit it with 2x and then 4x the traffic that our normal servers would get. The box just kept humming along.
The Mayor Daemon stuff looks like it's a major win too. Being able to redirect the console output from a machine at a co-loc facility back to your desktop can make life a lot easier.
And I must say, after meeting our local VA rep, if the rest are like him, they have got to have some of the best service out there.
Fixed now. The original link was to the article on one specific server. It was getting hammered. I called and had them change the link to the round robin www.deja.com and all is well.
The problem is that the script kiddies crack a few hosts sitting on T1s or better and then run the attack from there.
You might check out CERT's paper on distributed DoS attacks. They don't go into great detail, but it does explain how the kiddies operate.
"But always she's the spectre of uncertainty I first endured, then faded, then embraced..."
Wow, I didn't realize there were any other people on Earth that listen to Toy Matinee. One of my favorite albums of all time.
Where did you hear that from? Everything I've heard says that they lose money just like most other tech IPO companies. Wasn't there an article on /. about SuSe bragging that they actually turned a profit as compared to Redhat bleeding money?
I wouldn't exactly call it bleeding money. The ratio of their losses to their earnings is pretty small. They could easily become profitable by cutting costs and slowing growth, but they are much more interested in growing the business right now.
Are you on the RC5 team? Current theory is that they pulled it from there-apparently that's happened before I'm not on the Slashdot RC5 team and I got the spam. I am however on another RC5 team. Did they send it to everyone who's doing RC5?
I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that SETI@home's half million participants are currently being assigned the same 115 work units over and over again, all from three different sky locations collected on January 7 and 8. If anyone has seen any other work units recently -- especially from January 9 or later -- please speak up.
According to their web page, they are having problems with their "data pipeline" and that they hope to have it "fixed shortly".
Does anyone have experience with SWBell in Austin? I've heard that if you use them as an ISP, you're asking for really bad latency... in the 800ms range. But they are CHEAP - $10/month compared to $20 at texas.net and $30 at jump point. I suppose this is a case of getting what you pay for, but... anyone have a GOOD experience w/ swbell?
I saw a couple of traceroutes posted on one of the Austin newsgroups and the latency looked really bad. Maybe not 800ms, but much worse than ISDN. I've heard really good stuff about Jump Point's service. They really seem to have it together. Now if SWB would just fix the pair gain problem in our neighborhood.
The CAD stuff my users do wouldn't even begin to run on NT. Without a distributed file system and a server farm, they would spend 90% of their time waiting for their sims and rendering to finish.
A lot of the engineers have no clue how the apps should be installed. So they are set up in DFS. They have no idea how their machines should be set up, so we have an image that we can push out to any one of our 2400 machines.
So now our users can concentrate on designing their chips and making the company money instead of playing with the way the tools and machines are set up. They get to do what they do well and don't have to worry about the environment.
Houston at number 26? My apartment complex wires Ethernet right into the units. Show me another city that has that!
Several places in Austin have ethernet net connections available. The place my roommate used to live was setting their's up right before he bought his house. This was a year and a half ago.
Now if they would fix the pair gain problem in our neighborhood so we can replace our ISDN with DSL.
Enrollment may be up, but graduation is down according to the article. If this is true, this poses an even more interesting question: Why are more students failing or switching majors?
In my experience, the demand for tech workers is so great that businesses are hiring a lot of underclassmen. The companies throw money at anyone who seems to have the slightest bit of talent.
I've never gotten around to removing my resume from my outdated web page at my old college. I still get hits from people wanting to hire me for this and that.
Before you flame read on. I think the framers of the Constitution simply couldn't comprehend what some laws might come to mean in the future. I would seriously doubt they would haveadvocated regular citizens owning enough firepower to blow up a school. Remember what a gun meant in those days, a musket, with a reloading time of what, a minute or two? Contrast that with what we have today and there is a change in weaponry power of such a magnitude that no ruler in his right mind would allow a normal citizen to own it, much less have a guaranteed right to own it.
A musket was top of the line military hardware back in the 1760s. And I think they knew exactly what they were doing.
Funny you should mention that no ruler in his right mind would allow a normal citizen to own it. That's just what the Second Amendment was designed to prevent. The former colonies fought hard for their freedom and the Second was part of the designed as a way to fight to keep it, from all enemies, foreign and domestic.
A previous poster said that guns should be heavily regulated because they serve no other purposethan killing. I agree with that fully. Some people may be using firearms for sports, but the primary goal of firing a gun is still killing. We don't need to be able to kill (and if I remember correctly, the law even prohibits it in most countries ;). So why should a normal person be allowed to carry a gun?
How about self defense? The police in the US aren't required to protect you from criminals. Most times they only arrive in time to clean up the mess. And, unfortunately, there are cases in this country where you need firearms to protect yourself from the police.
Yes, handguns, assault rifles and the like are designed for one thing: causing phyiscal harm to human beings. But causing harm is sometimes necessary. In the US we have a right to self defense (and here in Texas, we have a right to defend our property.)
you mean like "A gun in the home is X times more likelyto be used on a fammily member than on an intruder"
Man, that study was so bad, I can't believe it actually was accepted into the New England Journal of Medicine.
When John Lott looked into those statistics he found that they didn't even ask if it was the gun kept in the home that was used. He found that no more than 4% of the killings could be attributed to the gun kept in the home.
Think how different the situation at Littleton, CO would have been with a couple of well trained gun owners incapacitating the killers.
It's happened before. The school shootings in Pearl, Miss. was stopped by an assistant principal when he retrieved a handgun from his car and disarmed the shooter.
The Colorado Senate was debating a concealed carry law just this week, but it has been shelved since the tradgedy in Littleton. Of course, the law (like most other CHL laws) had a provision to prevent concealed carry on school property. How much you want to bet the CHL law won't pass at all now?