What makes win32 pickier is the driver revisions. Linux drivers are generally written to support all versions of a piece of hardware since the drivers aren't shipped with the devices.
The only major thing with this type of mirror, though, is you will have to reconfigure the network info to prevent fights between machines.
There is a program called ITM (information technology management) that quite a few schools have implemented. Basically you get a class of elite geeks and let them do whatever they want for the year.
For example, in my grade 12 class, last year, we set up a network of linux boxes with all sorts of services like dns and NIS. Another group of kids were working on robotic projects. A few others worked on web pages. Some people even had the opportunity to work towards their CCNA.
I'm sure if you do some searches for ITM, you will find all sorts of information about it.
There is one downside; the freedom allows lazy kids to abuse their time. There was a measurable amount of students who didn't do work all year long.
I agree. I have never been 'into' cars, actually, quite the contrary; I had an intense fear of cars for the longest time. I wouldn't drive or even ride in them. I would ride my bike all over the place instead. Now I drive though.
I have no urge to own a car, new or classic. They are so expensive.. especially while I am saving for school. Not to mention that anything as inefficient as a combustion engine (especially classic muscle cars) is silly.
With all that aside, I don't think it is an intreset in classic cars that geeks share.. it is classic anything that we are interested in. And I'm not talking about stamp collecting either.
How good does it feel to find an old copy of 'Programming Perl' or a commodore 64 in the original box at a swap meet? I have a fetish for old clicky keyboards (I am always amazed that 'soft, silent keys' are listed as a feature on modern keyboards).
Who hasn't riffled through their own (or their parent's) record collection turning those songs into mp3's? For me, finding cheesy 80's pop still in the wrapper at liquidation world is a thrill.
I have my own horde of strange computer equipment that is older than I am and doesn't seem to have any purpose or standard around it (like a stack of serial hubs I found once), but it intreges me and that is why it is still in my house.
And I think that is it. As 'post modern geeks' we look at old things and are amazed that they were created without all the modern marvels we use to create today; it is hard to imagine designing a 747 without CAD, but it was done*.
* I think I remember hearing that they designed it with 'pencils and paper', but I may be wrong.
I have an epson stylus 640. Very nice. All the epson printers are very nice. The one complaint I have about them is not postscript support.
On the other hand, we have this wonderful tool called ghostscript that will turn a postscript file into your printer native language and you can do things like `cat/dev/lp0` or use lpr.
Writting filters for printcap isn't that hard either. I haven't bothered to do it yet, but I do have an alias set to turn a ps into a gs and dump it to lpr.
I wouldn't be surprized if someone made their filter available, although I use slackware and, from what I understand, the more frilly distros come with fancy gui's to set up printers.
Updating your site with news you read, but not a identical copy that you just grabbed off the site, would be ok. You're not copying anything. Just using information from the site to make your own version.
I purchased this book last week. Why? I find I can learn off of a website and get the jist, but when it comes to knowing something I have to read it from a book. I have an excellent computer setup, but I already spend hours a day sitting here coding and reading. When I want to learn something I jump to the couch behind my desk and start reading in 50 page chunks broken up by cups of tea.
I have a few ideas why I learn better this way too. For one, it is a lot easier to flip back 50 pages to look at a previous example than with a web page. Also, with my 15inch monitor and 40megs of ram, not having to jump around a website and wait for my swap to catch up is a bonus to my sanity.
And for the 'dead tree comment,' I would end up printing out and losing important sections repeatedly.
I would have to say that the Java API reference on the web is excellent, especially for finding which methods are inherented.
In the 'Real World,' you would never run more than one service on a box. In a home lan situation, you can cheat.
I'm not saying don't keep security in mind, but there shouldn't be anything wrong with using a fileserver for a firewall on a home lan. Just remember that your files are on the internet, so don't do stupid things like public shares.
Ipchains can do some really nice things for you. For instance, you can say, "I don't want any traffic from eth0 going to the rpc ports."
So, if you have two nics in your gateway, and eth0 is plugged into your modem and eth1 is plugged into a hub on your lan, your local boxes could talk rpc to the gateway, but any box on the internet couldn't.
This does take a lot of research. I suggest getting nmap and port scanning. For the most part, you are safe if you can scan from a box on the internet (borrow a shell) and see only a ssh port open, or whatever other services that need to talk to the internet.
As for setting up a file server, just pick a daemon and make sure all of your workstations have clients. You probably want to use samba since it is more secure (relativily) than nfs (aka No F*cking Security). Then again, meet your needs.
Another post on this thread mentioned getting a 486 and setting it up as a gateway. If you do this, and still want to offer nntp and smtp to the outside world, you will have to port forward. There is nothing wrong with that, but it can get messy if you get lazy.
I really enjoyed reading this. It was very amusing.
Normally, statements suggesting 'geeks spend too much time on computers' are offensive, but here it wasn't.
And I would have to say that most of it is correct. My current girlfriend is a geek -- straight A's in the advanced courses, really 'straight edge', yadda yadda yadda. Although, she isn't very good with computers, which is a good thing as it gives us breathing space (but I still try and teach her OO programming techniques every now and then).
One piece of advice I would like to add: Find a lady that looks good without makeup on and you will never be dissapointed. Where can you meet girls without makeup on? Go and do althletic stuff. Not that athletic? Go play ultimate (frisbee, for those who don't know) as there are more forgiving people willing to teach and wait for your growing pains than any other sport. Not to mention 'naked points' -- the number one "try before you buy".
Unfortunetly, if the distro's do it automagically... well, didn't MS do something like that? Not to mention, what happens when I reinstall slackware on my system once every year and a half? Am I reregistered? That would be another MS tactic I think (to be fair, and company looking for big numbers to stuff into the next press release).
Although, I would have to say that yes, having distros remind is probably a good idea. Or even better, when Redhat sets the default homepage for netscape (I don't know if this happens) to redhat.com, they could probably have a form to sign into the counter on their page.
I read that, and throughout I kept thinking, "Gee, that is *my* girlfriend they are describing."
Personally, I think that the people behind this article have very little self esteem if they think geeks are sub-people. But that is pretty obvious anyways.
By far, the easiest unix install I have ever encountered is FreeBSD.. just point it to the ftp and walk away.
After that, I would have to say slackware. I just installed the slack7pre1 and it was amazing and beautiful. There was no fancy gui, but all the information I needed to get the system up was right on the screen. Not to mention I got the choice of gnome, kde, wm, and e (even though those aren't all in the same category).
Not that I am making light of it, nor am I writing off those who have to live through the earthquakes, but how do we know that these earthquakes are really happening? It could all just be a ploy to bring the prices of ram up. Governments have done worse things for less in the past.
Not that I am a conspiracy theory whacko, but I have seen some really good fx. Can we trust the media? Nope, they have already proved that over and over again.
Not to mention that the ram fabs aren't near the top of the 'worlds greediest people' list.
Does that mean you upgrade you distro to upgrade your kernel? You can download kernel patches from a very large network of mirrors, and they aren't that big (maybe the biggest one is a meg).
And, as you mention that you were disappointed for "programming reasons", a programmer, like you, shouldn't be affraid to recompile a kernel.
That is unless you are talking about the fact you think the only thing that changed with slack4 is a new kernel, which is wrong; the new versions feature more important things like security and bug fixes.
Although a libc=>glibc change is huge, it is probably opening up a can of security holes. I can garauntee that you will be unpleased with the performance and reliability of slack7 if you expect a library change to change the world.
Funny, I seem to be running a 2.2.12 kernel just fine on my slack4 box. I don't think your libc has anything to do with whether your kernel will boot or not, considering that libc will not be around when you do boot.
80 words a minute and you aren't touch? I would have to say that is an all out lie, but you never know.. Logistically, your mind would have to be working pretty hard to concentrate on what you were type and looking for the right keys to press at the same time.
And it is all personal preference. I have seen reports that say dvorak is no faster, if not slower, than qwerty. Then again, I have also seen reports that say NT is more stable than Linux.
Those who seem to type way faster using dvorak keyboards are probably like that because they were fast on qwerty already, but then read about this amazing dvorak thing and worked really hard at getting good at that. It has more to do with personal drive than the keyboard layout in this situation.
Not to mention the fact that you have to take into consideration which keys that you press most often (I am talking about vocabulary and such).
If you want to type fast, go to a swap meet and find the clickiest, most responsive keyboard you can find.
And I would like to take this chance to say that Slashdot has seen this discussion about 150 times already. Too bad slashdot is not accumulative knowledge wise. I bet you could find this whole discussion already done with in the archives if you simply typed 'dvorak keyboard' into the little search field. Save Ask Slashdot for real, unanswered questions.
When I get into a situation like this, I write my own level of abstraction.
Make your own functions to create objects. To draw a button create your own function. When you call that function, depending on what library you are using, that function calls the toolkit function to draw a button.
This method adds overhead to function calls. But then again, you can 'port' to whatever library/toolkit you want.
I actually stole this idea, in a sense, from reading about the TCP/IP stack and how layer N can only 'talk to' (read call functions in) layer N+1.
The whole idea behind this is portability; as your program structure changes, it only changes in the layer you are working in and you don't have to rewrite your whole program. Therefore, if you substitute KDE for GTK or vice versa, you only have to change the functions that access the toolkit API.
I bet there is some official name and technique to this if you go to structured programming school.
Face the facts: no matter how bad a service is, you will live with it.
I have had a cable modem in Canada (with 'rogers'@Home) for just under 6 months. I have a few friends who have had the service for over two years.
I could bitch away at all the bad things that happened, from the first day when the lady on the phone asked if I had an IBM or a Mac, and I said PC (this went on for about 5 minutes).
The bottom line is when you are dealing in with unmotivated workers, things are going to suck. I bet it is pretty hard to be motivated when you are installing a cable modem for some obnoxious teenager who is mocking you all the time because you don't know that dos linux thing.
I would have to say that despite the major outages and the lack of communication between me and my ISP, things have been pretty decent. Just recently I started to get 300k/s downloads on a regular basis.
The only people I know who have had problems with their cable modems are the ones who run a win32 variety directly connected to the modem. Even when the modem is smoking and dropping packets, unix gateways seem to be able to atleast get the packets out (that is talk to other boxes, rather than constantly time out).
Cable isn't mission critical; you will have to deal with outages, and you will be pretty pissed when you have to wait on the phone for 2 hours to find out what is wrong, but be grateful for the pseudo leased line you are getting.
Now then, I can't tell you which ISP to select, but remember that everyone is going to tell you their horror stories. You are probably better off to probe into each ISP and ask them about how they do their routing and what type of hardware they are using. You may hit a security through obscurity barrier, but keep pushing.
Write a perlscript to handle the playlist, then you could start one mpg123 to/dev/dsp1 (or whatever it calls it) so you could prelisten before you start playing.
Although, if you are trying to sync things up so they play into eachother nicely, it may be more difficult. But I am sure there are ways of starting part way into a song and getting the timing. Actually, when you kill mpg123, it says how many seconds it played. Therefore, you could get that with a bit of regex, as long as you could start the song on that second.
Unfortunetly, you would only get a resolution of 1 beat per second, which isn't fine enough (considering house is generally played at 2 beats per second, and most electronica stuff just goes up from there.)
Then again, the source is there: do with it what you like.
You are worried about a 500mhz pc becoming obsolete in 2 years? My 200 is 3 years old, and I haven't had a single reason to upgrade the processor. And a dual board as well. Last time I checked, 1000mhz will always be good for something; 386's make good terminals (I got my first 386 9 years ago) and 486's make excellent gateways (I got my first 486 5 years ago). 4 years from now, you will be using that as a web server or something similar.
Don't be pulled through the processor game. Your box will rocking for atleast 3 years. If trends continue, 3000mhz boxes will exist at that point, so it would be like having a 200 now.
More importantly, they should spend less time looking at StickMan porn and more time screening Ask Slashdot.
This is getting to be really sad. I sent in a technical question about cutting edge technology and how to tie this into a project that would get linux into a school districts network to start replacing the NT boxes (it was about the HP SureStore tape drive that was purchased for a backup device on a web server), but low level Jerry Springer Talk Show style internet trash like seriously questioning the validity of spam content makes it on slashdot instead?
You are going to have to get a device to act as a bridge between the two networks. There are commerical products, but you should be able to find a token ring card and just set up a NAT or masq between the two networks.
I have not had much experience with token ring under linux, but as far as I know, it should be supported on a card by card basis (there is token stuff in the kernel). You'll just have to find some of those cards.
Hmmm, it seems to be broken already. The page does not display properly and it is damn slow.
What a way to demo win2k; a server and web content that does not serve to unix clients (as well as any other platform that uses Netscape). But, as MS reps have told me, in the "real" world, everyone uses NT.
If you want to go to a directory service (which seems to be the case if you need to syncronize) there is a Java based (java sucks, but I also think there are X clients as well) project called Ganymede (I think, I may be spelling it wrong).
It kind of looks like NT user management and such, but it intergrates such things as Dynamic DNS and DHCP and all of those sort of things. If you are unfamiliar with directory services, they basically bind a whole lot of data togther (like user names, workstations, ip's, dns entries et cetra).
Go look on freshmeat, I have not used it myself, but it looks pretty nice.
Slashdot Mirror
are you sure that linux is pickier?
What makes win32 pickier is the driver revisions. Linux drivers are generally written to support all versions of a piece of hardware since the drivers aren't shipped with the devices.
The only major thing with this type of mirror, though, is you will have to reconfigure the network info to prevent fights between machines.
There is a program called ITM (information technology management) that quite a few schools have implemented. Basically you get a class of elite geeks and let them do whatever they want for the year.
For example, in my grade 12 class, last year, we set up a network of linux boxes with all sorts of services like dns and NIS. Another group of kids were working on robotic projects. A few others worked on web pages. Some people even had the opportunity to work towards their CCNA.
I'm sure if you do some searches for ITM, you will find all sorts of information about it.
There is one downside; the freedom allows lazy kids to abuse their time. There was a measurable amount of students who didn't do work all year long.
How come there is no picture of S4?
I agree. I have never been 'into' cars, actually, quite the contrary; I had an intense fear of cars for the longest time. I wouldn't drive or even ride in them. I would ride my bike all over the place instead. Now I drive though.
I have no urge to own a car, new or classic. They are so expensive.. especially while I am saving for school. Not to mention that anything as inefficient as a combustion engine (especially classic muscle cars) is silly.
With all that aside, I don't think it is an intreset in classic cars that geeks share.. it is classic anything that we are interested in. And I'm not talking about stamp collecting either.
How good does it feel to find an old copy of 'Programming Perl' or a commodore 64 in the original box at a swap meet? I have a fetish for old clicky keyboards (I am always amazed that 'soft, silent keys' are listed as a feature on modern keyboards).
Who hasn't riffled through their own (or their parent's) record collection turning those songs into mp3's? For me, finding cheesy 80's pop still in the wrapper at liquidation world is a thrill.
I have my own horde of strange computer equipment that is older than I am and doesn't seem to have any purpose or standard around it (like a stack of serial hubs I found once), but it intreges me and that is why it is still in my house.
And I think that is it. As 'post modern geeks' we look at old things and are amazed that they were created without all the modern marvels we use to create today; it is hard to imagine designing a 747 without CAD, but it was done*.
* I think I remember hearing that they designed it with 'pencils and paper', but I may be wrong.
I have an epson stylus 640. Very nice. All the epson printers are very nice. The one complaint I have about them is not postscript support.
/dev/lp0` or use lpr.
On the other hand, we have this wonderful tool called ghostscript that will turn a postscript file into your printer native language and you can do things like `cat
Writting filters for printcap isn't that hard either. I haven't bothered to do it yet, but I do have an alias set to turn a ps into a gs and dump it to lpr.
I wouldn't be surprized if someone made their filter available, although I use slackware and, from what I understand, the more frilly distros come with fancy gui's to set up printers.
have fun.
Oh, you mean like plagairizing?
I purchased this book last week. Why? I find I can learn off of a website and get the jist, but when it comes to knowing something I have to read it from a book. I have an excellent computer setup, but I already spend hours a day sitting here coding and reading. When I want to learn something I jump to the couch behind my desk and start reading in 50 page chunks broken up by cups of tea.
I have a few ideas why I learn better this way too. For one, it is a lot easier to flip back 50 pages to look at a previous example than with a web page. Also, with my 15inch monitor and 40megs of ram, not having to jump around a website and wait for my swap to catch up is a bonus to my sanity.
And for the 'dead tree comment,' I would end up printing out and losing important sections repeatedly.
I would have to say that the Java API reference on the web is excellent, especially for finding which methods are inherented.
In the 'Real World,' you would never run more than one service on a box. In a home lan situation, you can cheat.
I'm not saying don't keep security in mind, but there shouldn't be anything wrong with using a fileserver for a firewall on a home lan. Just remember that your files are on the internet, so don't do stupid things like public shares.
Ipchains can do some really nice things for you. For instance, you can say, "I don't want any traffic from eth0 going to the rpc ports."
So, if you have two nics in your gateway, and eth0 is plugged into your modem and eth1 is plugged into a hub on your lan, your local boxes could talk rpc to the gateway, but any box on the internet couldn't.
This does take a lot of research. I suggest getting nmap and port scanning. For the most part, you are safe if you can scan from a box on the internet (borrow a shell) and see only a ssh port open, or whatever other services that need to talk to the internet.
As for setting up a file server, just pick a daemon and make sure all of your workstations have clients. You probably want to use samba since it is more secure (relativily) than nfs (aka No F*cking Security). Then again, meet your needs.
Another post on this thread mentioned getting a 486 and setting it up as a gateway. If you do this, and still want to offer nntp and smtp to the outside world, you will have to port forward. There is nothing wrong with that, but it can get messy if you get lazy.
have fun.
Considering the USSR no longer exists, one half of the agreement no longer exists. I would assume having an agreement with nobody isn't going to hold.
:)
Other things to consider:
- was it the US who developed these weapons, or was it some other country
- was the 'anti-anti-balistic weapons' agreement made with Russia?
I am ignorant to most of the issues, but I might start somebody who isn't on the right path
I really enjoyed reading this. It was very amusing.
Normally, statements suggesting 'geeks spend too much time on computers' are offensive, but here it wasn't.
And I would have to say that most of it is correct. My current girlfriend is a geek -- straight A's in the advanced courses, really 'straight edge', yadda yadda yadda. Although, she isn't very good with computers, which is a good thing as it gives us breathing space (but I still try and teach her OO programming techniques every now and then).
One piece of advice I would like to add: Find a lady that looks good without makeup on and you will never be dissapointed. Where can you meet girls without makeup on? Go and do althletic stuff. Not that athletic? Go play ultimate (frisbee, for those who don't know) as there are more forgiving people willing to teach and wait for your growing pains than any other sport. Not to mention 'naked points' -- the number one "try before you buy".
:)
Unfortunetly, if the distro's do it automagically... well, didn't MS do something like that? Not to mention, what happens when I reinstall slackware on my system once every year and a half? Am I reregistered? That would be another MS tactic I think (to be fair, and company looking for big numbers to stuff into the next press release).
Although, I would have to say that yes, having distros remind is probably a good idea. Or even better, when Redhat sets the default homepage for netscape (I don't know if this happens) to redhat.com, they could probably have a form to sign into the counter on their page.
Just an idea.
I read that, and throughout I kept thinking, "Gee, that is *my* girlfriend they are describing."
Personally, I think that the people behind this article have very little self esteem if they think geeks are sub-people. But that is pretty obvious anyways.
By far, the easiest unix install I have ever encountered is FreeBSD.. just point it to the ftp and walk away.
After that, I would have to say slackware. I just installed the slack7pre1 and it was amazing and beautiful. There was no fancy gui, but all the information I needed to get the system up was right on the screen. Not to mention I got the choice of gnome, kde, wm, and e (even though those aren't all in the same category).
Not that I am making light of it, nor am I writing off those who have to live through the earthquakes, but how do we know that these earthquakes are really happening? It could all just be a ploy to bring the prices of ram up. Governments have done worse things for less in the past.
Not that I am a conspiracy theory whacko, but I have seen some really good fx. Can we trust the media? Nope, they have already proved that over and over again.
Not to mention that the ram fabs aren't near the top of the 'worlds greediest people' list.
Does that mean you upgrade you distro to upgrade your kernel? You can download kernel patches from a very large network of mirrors, and they aren't that big (maybe the biggest one is a meg).
And, as you mention that you were disappointed for "programming reasons", a programmer, like you, shouldn't be affraid to recompile a kernel.
That is unless you are talking about the fact you think the only thing that changed with slack4 is a new kernel, which is wrong; the new versions feature more important things like security and bug fixes.
Although a libc=>glibc change is huge, it is probably opening up a can of security holes. I can garauntee that you will be unpleased with the performance and reliability of slack7 if you expect a library change to change the world.
Funny, I seem to be running a 2.2.12 kernel just fine on my slack4 box. I don't think your libc has anything to do with whether your kernel will boot or not, considering that libc will not be around when you do boot.
80 words a minute and you aren't touch? I would have to say that is an all out lie, but you never know.. Logistically, your mind would have to be working pretty hard to concentrate on what you were type and looking for the right keys to press at the same time.
And it is all personal preference. I have seen reports that say dvorak is no faster, if not slower, than qwerty. Then again, I have also seen reports that say NT is more stable than Linux.
Those who seem to type way faster using dvorak keyboards are probably like that because they were fast on qwerty already, but then read about this amazing dvorak thing and worked really hard at getting good at that. It has more to do with personal drive than the keyboard layout in this situation.
Not to mention the fact that you have to take into consideration which keys that you press most often (I am talking about vocabulary and such).
If you want to type fast, go to a swap meet and find the clickiest, most responsive keyboard you can find.
And I would like to take this chance to say that Slashdot has seen this discussion about 150 times already. Too bad slashdot is not accumulative knowledge wise. I bet you could find this whole discussion already done with in the archives if you simply typed 'dvorak keyboard' into the little search field. Save Ask Slashdot for real, unanswered questions.
When I get into a situation like this, I write my own level of abstraction.
Make your own functions to create objects. To draw a button create your own function. When you call that function, depending on what library you are using, that function calls the toolkit function to draw a button.
This method adds overhead to function calls. But then again, you can 'port' to whatever library/toolkit you want.
I actually stole this idea, in a sense, from reading about the TCP/IP stack and how layer N can only 'talk to' (read call functions in) layer N+1.
The whole idea behind this is portability; as your program structure changes, it only changes in the layer you are working in and you don't have to rewrite your whole program. Therefore, if you substitute KDE for GTK or vice versa, you only have to change the functions that access the toolkit API.
I bet there is some official name and technique to this if you go to structured programming school.
Face the facts: no matter how bad a service is, you will live with it.
I have had a cable modem in Canada (with 'rogers'@Home) for just under 6 months. I have a few friends who have had the service for over two years.
I could bitch away at all the bad things that happened, from the first day when the lady on the phone asked if I had an IBM or a Mac, and I said PC (this went on for about 5 minutes).
The bottom line is when you are dealing in with unmotivated workers, things are going to suck. I bet it is pretty hard to be motivated when you are installing a cable modem for some obnoxious teenager who is mocking you all the time because you don't know that dos linux thing.
I would have to say that despite the major outages and the lack of communication between me and my ISP, things have been pretty decent. Just recently I started to get 300k/s downloads on a regular basis.
The only people I know who have had problems with their cable modems are the ones who run a win32 variety directly connected to the modem. Even when the modem is smoking and dropping packets, unix gateways seem to be able to atleast get the packets out (that is talk to other boxes, rather than constantly time out).
Cable isn't mission critical; you will have to deal with outages, and you will be pretty pissed when you have to wait on the phone for 2 hours to find out what is wrong, but be grateful for the pseudo leased line you are getting.
Now then, I can't tell you which ISP to select, but remember that everyone is going to tell you their horror stories. You are probably better off to probe into each ISP and ask them about how they do their routing and what type of hardware they are using. You may hit a security through obscurity barrier, but keep pushing.
Tis all for now.
Write a perlscript to handle the playlist, then you could start one mpg123 to /dev/dsp1 (or whatever it calls it) so you could prelisten before you start playing.
Although, if you are trying to sync things up so they play into eachother nicely, it may be more difficult. But I am sure there are ways of starting part way into a song and getting the timing. Actually, when you kill mpg123, it says how many seconds it played. Therefore, you could get that with a bit of regex, as long as you could start the song on that second.
Unfortunetly, you would only get a resolution of 1 beat per second, which isn't fine enough (considering house is generally played at 2 beats per second, and most electronica stuff just goes up from there.)
Then again, the source is there: do with it what you like.
You are worried about a 500mhz pc becoming obsolete in 2 years? My 200 is 3 years old, and I haven't had a single reason to upgrade the processor. And a dual board as well. Last time I checked, 1000mhz will always be good for something; 386's make good terminals (I got my first 386 9 years ago) and 486's make excellent gateways (I got my first 486 5 years ago). 4 years from now, you will be using that as a web server or something similar.
Don't be pulled through the processor game. Your box will rocking for atleast 3 years. If trends continue, 3000mhz boxes will exist at that point, so it would be like having a 200 now.
More importantly, they should spend less time looking at StickMan porn and more time screening Ask Slashdot.
This is getting to be really sad. I sent in a technical question about cutting edge technology and how to tie this into a project that would get linux into a school districts network to start replacing the NT boxes (it was about the HP SureStore tape drive that was purchased for a backup device on a web server), but low level Jerry Springer Talk Show style internet trash like seriously questioning the validity of spam content makes it on slashdot instead?
I suppose it is all objective.
You are going to have to get a device to act as a bridge between the two networks. There are commerical products, but you should be able to find a token ring card and just set up a NAT or masq between the two networks.
I have not had much experience with token ring under linux, but as far as I know, it should be supported on a card by card basis (there is token stuff in the kernel). You'll just have to find some of those cards.
Hmmm, it seems to be broken already. The page does not display properly and it is damn slow.
What a way to demo win2k; a server and web content that does not serve to unix clients (as well as any other platform that uses Netscape). But, as MS reps have told me, in the "real" world, everyone uses NT.
Okay, back to my imaginary job working with Unix.
If you want to go to a directory service (which seems to be the case if you need to syncronize) there is a Java based (java sucks, but I also think there are X clients as well) project called Ganymede (I think, I may be spelling it wrong).
It kind of looks like NT user management and such, but it intergrates such things as Dynamic DNS and DHCP and all of those sort of things. If you are unfamiliar with directory services, they basically bind a whole lot of data togther (like user names, workstations, ip's, dns entries et cetra).
Go look on freshmeat, I have not used it myself, but it looks pretty nice.