i currently run Mozilla 1.5 under win2k, the latest version of WiMP is the stock 6.4, and it's gonna stay that way. Realplayer is staying as far away from this LAN as is possible. I should remain immune to this shit, and if not, there's always a full blown *nix desktop (i'm content to keep linux server-side until things with windows get ugly.)
biggest goof i've done: I was adding a new box to my home network, moving my old main drive to another system, adding a brand new drive in my main workstation, formatting the new drive, transferring the files from the old drive to that one, and finally reformatting the old drive and installing a new system.
The time was 9pm and i was on a bit of the tired side.
I started installing the new drive's OS, and absentmindedly thought i'd run the format on the other drive. the boxes were in two differet rooms 50 walking feet apart, i started the old drive (filled with critical data) formatting BEFORE i copied the data, i realized this after the new box was up and i went to access the old data for transfer, fortunatly the drive format had hit 2% (NTFS). i spent the next 6 hours recovering data from that nearly doomed drive... got 70% back plus stuff from the drive's first life, who knew.
Since then, I do ONE drive format at a time. In addition, all uber critical files are kept on a RAID5 linux server (dupe files are all ove the place as the really important stuff dsoesn't exceed 50MB.
Oh yeah, and any maintenance to the server follows the following procedure: shutdown samba/NFS. unmount raid array. stop raid array. backup raidtab.
I live in SW FLA, 6 months out of the year the outdoors is pretty much uninhabitable (humidity 100%, 90-100 deg. F, time to burn =10 minutes w/o sunscreen and afternoon thunderstorms + big bugs...), the other 6 is's either muggy, or cold. only for 2 months or so is it really 'nice' IMO. That and with my sensitivity to light (a geek who lives in a cave... thats a new one) and general dislike of the outdoors (parents took me on a mountain hike of some 5 miles when i was 2, they didn't know it was that long... hated outdoor activity since), and i don't do outdoor sports. I bowl, quite well i say. I watch Football and baseball and hockey on TV and go to the occasional game in Tampa.
Methinks within 30 years, however, pro sports will be on the decline, as the demographic of the average sports viewer isn't getting any younger.
I used to be a 100% windows user, ntil i put together, with the help of the local linux guru/LAN party hosting guy, a linux based file server, i needed RAID, didnt have a controller card and had no use for a gui on a headless box. the box was red hat 8. in the past 9 months i've become much more intimatly familiar with *nix. My router is linux, and i just deployed two new boxes, one of them a dual boot with Win2k (for gaming). Only one of the three nix boxes has a GUI, and that right now is KDE. Granted it's a bit klunky compared to Win2k's, in fact ir reminds me more of Windows 95's desktop. Win2k's file manager/web browser/ftp client combo is nice, just type in a different address, but it has many, many, many bugs and holes.
I toyed with the idea of setting up a nix box for my parents, just mozilla, evo and OO.o. until i found out that they needed Quicken 2003 (Crossover didnt deliver).
In any case, I like nix better for some things, windows for others. Is nix suitable for use by the general population? no. it took me 6 months to shake windows logic, the gneral populus would keel over and die, at the least they'd be screaming mad.
I've used Winamp 2.91 for ages, I HATE 3 with a passion, so dang unstable.
I wonder if statbar will support winamp 5 controls;)
this thing liike interesting.
I've gotten into XMMS 1.2.8 in linux, that is when my sound works (gentoo + 2.4 + alsa + audigy != work;( )
of course, mpg123 and cmix work from a console too, especally over SSH.
i'll grab 5 as soon as i get the opportunity. looks good to me.
remember Freelancer? A few familiar faces and names from the SF&F genre showed up in that game (John Rhys-Davies and George Takei at least) I was quite surprised. They need more hollywood talent in the game industry, there have been some well written games out there (Freelancer had a VERY compelling single player campaign).
If they can get away from the liscensing and into actually using real talent (writers, actors) then the industry will get mainstream recognition. Though these hollywood types are DEFINATLY gonna need at attitude adjustment if they are gonna do games. Mabye Wil Wheaton could do something (j/k... or not?)
I started a corporation 2 years ago (well, started it with my dad's help anyways, i was 16 at the time), doing consulting/technical work for local residential and commercial customers. It's VERY small scale and VERY word-of-mouth. I have at least one job a week (paying $40-$80, decent for a H.S. senior working 2 hours a week).
I level with my customers, since everything is one-on-one, it teaches you MANY things, the customer is always right... as long as they know what they're talking about. An irate client will think something is wrong when they don't understand things. make them understand.
In the past two years, I've had ONE botched client, and I was the one who screwed up, he was my first client in over three months, and wanted to upgrade his (very slow) box, i saw $$$ and went to work trying to milk him for money. the plan backfired. Fortunatly my reputation was not damaged.
If you're just starting out, make sure you have cash to live off of for two years. in my case, I'm living at home, this all expenses are paid for.
A relaxed atmosphere works wonders, even though i'm a one-man op, i cannot see it staying that way. Timely E-mail replies are key, as others said, phone support is also a must.
When someone calls me with a problem and explains it in their limited way, I offer to come out and take a look, instead of:
1) they explain things vaguely
2) you try to gather more specific information, irritating the customer who is confused
3) you try a solution, they get confused and Irate.
4) you finaly suggest you send someone to take a looksee, they, already in a bad mood, and having had much time wasted, insist on asking how many $$$ it'll cost, and reject it
5) you wind up losing a client
Proper way of doing things:
1) they explain things vaguely
2) get more info by asking what programs are acting up
3) offer to go out/send someone to take a look at the problem, ask them when is covenient, most residential customers will accept a 24 hour delay, depends on when the call was recieved if pulling same day (Do not charge extra for same-day service).
4)Client will accept, and spend the money because they are in a good mood (your quick willingness to cut to the chase)
5) client tells friends about your good service
6) Profit!!!
be friendly, above all, if you get 'my cupholder is broken' level stuff, be calm, and immediatly say you'll come and fix/take a look at it, put them at ease ASAP.
Drop business cards with every client, let your good service sell for you (one res.client referred my services to three others, I've gotten ove $1500 from that single referral. Another business client helped, too, I do the support for the office staff's home boxes now too:)
And don't be money hungry, quick fixes backfire.
indeed the only way to crack the damn thing is to hack the password, the dialog locks out after several attempt to prevent brute-forcing.
there is a guy in my net studies class who works a bit for the IT guys, and thus knows the password. But like any government drone, he remains mum about it. And whenever comfronting the sysadmin, he conviently skirts around any issues relationg to DF... gee, i wonder whats up with that.
This box here at school (along with a few hundred others) has Deepfreeze. the BANE of us geeks, we can't fiddle and tweak with our boxen cuz the night classes have newbies *sigh*
Deepfreeze works at the MBR level, only way to circumvent it to blow the HD away (i.e. write zeros across it and sector zero.) easy way around that is a password on the bios (also on these boxers) to prevent alt boot sources A big honkin' Master lock on the covers keeps us from getting at the bios reflash jumpers, i.e these boxes are both idiot and GEEK proof:(
Deep Freeze + Ghost/DeployCenter is your FRIEND, just have 1 box be a dummy (i.e. no students fsck with it), get updates, make image, thten push over the network.
But be DAMN sure that it's PERFECT, at the beginning of the school year, fresh image contained the blaster worm, and with deepfreeze the fix didn't work. IT didn't give us the access codes for Deep Freeze so we used royally fucked up boxes for 3 weeks while a new image was made (yes, it took three weeks to: nuke a HD, load initial GHOST image, add new stuff, make new image, reimage rest of boxen). server core here in win2000, sucks ass. though we did get 4 Dual Xeon servers on the cheap. from Arthur Andersen when they went bye bye.
Great ideas for my PII-350/384M/4GB box, currently running Win2k (torrent/P2P/IRC idleman/MP3) running on an old ass packard hell 640x480x60hz radiation generator. VNC is available, but slow (i keep it at 32 bit color, why i don't know). I want to switch it to nix, probably slackware, and will need a WM. Boxes: 7 M$: 2.5 *nix: 4.5 screen real estate: not enough.
I use samba to share my files so i can't comment on NFS too much.
Similar setup: one Linux file server, 3 desktops (mixed nix and win2k), when the server shuts down, any cients active go nuts (winamp freezes, explorer complains about the sudden disconnect) best theing to do, since you're on a home network is to make sure no one's using the damn thing before you shut it down.
This is easy, even with 6 systems, (assuming samba), just make sure no programs are activly using the shares and reboot the box, the workstations will yelp in agony, until the server returns, then all's well.
In windows, when a mounted (read: drive mapped) smb share goes off line, windows complains, programs too, then windows marks the drive as disconnected, when the server's back up, reconnectying by just clicking the drive in My Computer restores everything to normal. I haven't messed with client side SMB under nix enough to know what happens when a samba server reboots (gracefully or otherwise) while files are in use client side.
My 6 year old TI-30 has taken a beating. Don't have a TI-8x yet, but getting one, need more firepower:)
it's been dropped, stepped on, smashed, slammed against desks, etc and keeps working.
i also have a 128MB flash drive thats very small (just the chip with some really hard clear yellow tinted plastic around it), the cap has a small fracture and the keyring piece broke off (weakest link), but it's been dropped from desk height onto concrete numerous times.
S.O.P. at one of the school i go to (i'm a student tech aide at both)
with new/malfunc box
1) wdclear, install ghost image
other school (the 'sysadmins' don't know a switch from a hub from a router, know nothing of bandwidth (tried to push ten ghost images over the same segment of a 10 megabit unswitched lan and wondered why it took 18 hours to run...)
1) get new box, add programs, deploy
malfunc:
bring box in, troubleshoot, reinstall from winXP install disk
2) install wrong drivers from driver disk (they all look alike, and they can't keep things straight)
3) make me spend 2 hours fixing their screwups, the so called windows tech cant do a driver install on xp to save his life, and the mac guru thinks entering an 8 character string in dos is way too complicated to the point of it being the 'wrong' way.
RA1... WINE?
WOOHOO!!!!!
i just fired up mandrake 9.1 3 days ago, i've been using red hat 8 in server mode for a long time now, and 2000 for my desktop which stubbornly refuses to run RA.
what about multiplayer? IPX i assume works, if the kernel is set up to use it, or does it do TCP/IP?
I had to use data recovery software a few years back after I accidentally started a NTFS format on a drive I was using as a temporary storage dump while the main drives were being upgraded... got back only 70% after a 3% format:( took hours too.
Best advice here is to keep active backups (Tape/CD is good for archival), if the files are small (docs/text/logs/source code), HD space is dirt cheap, get another drive (or partition) mount as something like/mnt/snafu and set rsync/cron/whatever to copy the files from the open (shared) partition to the snafu drive (something thats only writable (and therefore screwable by root and not your backup op or your regular user type) I'm sure there are more advanced way to do it, like say on the fly, but setting a cron script to run every 5 minutes and unless you go straight into doing CD backups 5 within 5 minutes of copying data to the drive, you're OK.
I have a shitload of files, most of them size-wise are.avi.mpg and.mp3, the rest are programs, docs, etc. all of which easily fit elsewhere (the actual "mission critical" files can fit on a single CD, and therefore anywhere on my LAN) even with RAID, there's no excuse for a good backup, RAID does mechanical failures, but an errant rm -rf very mportantdir/veryimportantfile is hard to recover from, if doing backups to media, MAKE SURE that they're duped on the HD first, in case something like this happens to you, a quick tar -czvf stufftobackup.tgz [your files here] before you run your backup will save your ass, better yet, make the tar, then just back that up, don't screw around with the originals where possible.
I need to get my hands on a Ti-8x calculator, Algebra II trig/Calc will kill my aging Ti-30.
I like the Ti30, simple scientific calc, single line display though, and with anything higher than algebra 1 type stuff you REALLY need more firepower (I should have gotten one three years ago, I see they haven't dropped in price at all).
the first 'language' (yes, i know, not a real programming language per se) that I learned whatn i was right around that age was HTML, it introduces the logic process common to programming, and once she has HTML down, CSS, and PHP is easy to add in. PHP of course paves the way for the bigger languages. HTML is VERY visual which helps the first time learner (especially a child).
DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE HER! show her HTML now, and she'll be outdoing you in C+ database apps at 16:) OK, mabye not, but HTML->PHP->MySQL->[insert DB here]
|->Perl->BASH
|->C+
Besides, the more X chromosomes we have in the geek gene pool, the better, we need more people like that, makes fewer ignorant people in the world.
This TV season is really the first that I'm watching my favorite shows off of BT rather than the TV. I watch 10 hours of Prime time per week 4 hours of that is SG-1 on sci-fi monday nights (until my DVD/RIP collection is complete). the rest is: NCIS (CBS tuesday) Smallville (WB wednesday) Enterprise (BT, wed. runs alongside Smallville) JAG (CBS friday) 1 hour FOX sunday
most shows I watch on BT, skipping the damn commercials. most are highly annoying anyhow, local car peddlers, drugs and M$FT...
Granted some are hilarious, MGD, Bud and Aflac rarely disappoint in the humor department, but the rest REALLY GET ON MY NERVES!
With the average ENT episode clocking in at 42:30 with intro/end credits (the last 60s are the end creds which on broadcast are always overlapped by ads anyway that means... 18:30 of commercials (17:30 not counting the end creds overlay). frankly, thats obsurd, and 10:00 of that are the same damn ads over and over and over and over again. i don't have TiVo, but i do have BT, the next best thing IMO considering i do have the bandwidth and time (and don't EVER tell me that i'm getting them for free, bandwidth costs $$$, time is also a huge ass commodity.
I've been riding the wave of the technology revolution for the past thirteen years, seen the good and the bad (in that order) of computing in the classroom.
When I started Kindergarten, 1990, the classroom (district: SRQ, FLA) of ~30 was teamed up with 60 more 1st and 2nd graders who, besides collaborating on projects, shared a classroom that was equipped with filmstrip, overhead/opaque projectors and a Laserdisc player (each room had a CCTV to get 'beamed' VHS tapes from the media center too). in this room, there was also a set of 25-30 Apple IIc's (with speach synths, 5.25/3.5" drives and color monitors) powered by a Mac classic. I was the only student among the 90 who figured out what 'user name' and 'password' were on the login prompts, the third week or so of school, i saw a few boxes at this prompt, and proceded to enter my name... no luck (remember, I was 6 at the time), then saw a number on the top of the monitors, typed that in. It worked. And when open house came around, the teacher sent me to the lab to power it up, much to my parent's surprise (we didn't evn have a computer at the time), I was running that place:) We got a computer (a 386DX running DOS 5 and Windows 3.0) the next week, thus beginning my rise into geekdom.
Two years later, I transferred schools, the classroom has a single Apple IIe, monochrome + 2x5.25 drives. quite a step back. Again, I took over, keeping the disks safe from harm and the system running. trips to the computer Lab (20+ of the same) were likewise:) the following year or so, after I left they got some nice powermacs.
moving up, later in 2nd grade (transferred again, this time to the big 'Gifted' school), found a lab full of LCII and LCIII macs, I knew more than every student in the 2nd grade, and debunked a few misnomers the teachers tried to peddle (also thwarted the typing nazi's with my 25 WPM one handed). Later, in the 4th grade I befriended the Programming/Astronomy teacher who ran a lab of 486's e/ Win95. The school was 90% MAC otherwise, but I kept on top of things.
The teachers who had computers in their classrooms occasionally used them for teaching, but this was when they were still primative (best you could do is pipe the signal to a TV), and thus wern't used as a crutch... yet.
6th grade, and a new school, LCII's and one very nice PowerPC in the room, during that year I befriended the technology facilitator (think 50% sysadmin, 25% helpdesk, 15% drone and 5% teacher) who put me to work inspecting networking cables (not all boxes had ethernet lines properly installed). We got internet connectivity later that year, along with the vaunted AR (Accelerated Reader) program, used as a big fat crutch for taching reading comprehension (it assigned books 'points' and a 'grade level' based on the size and complexity of the book, passing a test gave you points, which if accumulated could be used to 'buy' prizes, thus the student's feeble and porous minds think "Books == points == reward" I rarely used the thing, and still read books like H2G2, 2001, 2010, and lots of verne and HG Wells all in 6th grade and throughout middle school).
7th grade saw my first technologically immersed classroom. the gifted pilot program at the school (of which I was in the flagship class) paid off, with 4 new classrooms, 3 of which had 4 brand spanking new All-in-one G3's with OS 8, and the 4th room (the science lab) had 8 of these machines! one box to every 4 students. Having a handicap (and the IEP that went with it), and a little sucking up to the teacher got me my own box (#8). The G3's wern't used as a crutch, the class was lab intensive but all were done in the real world, the computer served as a resource (information, Word processor, etc) and as a toy, occasionally. (after a given assignment was completed, the give group coould play games (which were, thankfully science related, Gizmo's and Gadgets being one (basic mechanical and electrical principles) and Simcity 2000 being the other
perhaps WF put some (not-so)spyware on their machines, and if they logon to the net, BAM! the IP address is made, and a traceroute grabs the identity of the gateway router, whois gets the ISP's info, tell the cops and you get one busted criminal.
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i currently run Mozilla 1.5 under win2k, the latest version of WiMP is the stock 6.4, and it's gonna stay that way. Realplayer is staying as far away from this LAN as is possible. I should remain immune to this shit, and if not, there's always a full blown *nix desktop (i'm content to keep linux server-side until things with windows get ugly.)
biggest goof i've done:
I was adding a new box to my home network, moving my old main drive to another system, adding a brand new drive in my main workstation, formatting the new drive, transferring the files from the old drive to that one, and finally reformatting the old drive and installing a new system.
The time was 9pm and i was on a bit of the tired side.
I started installing the new drive's OS, and absentmindedly thought i'd run the format on the other drive. the boxes were in two differet rooms 50 walking feet apart, i started the old drive (filled with critical data) formatting BEFORE i copied the data, i realized this after the new box was up and i went to access the old data for transfer, fortunatly the drive format had hit 2% (NTFS). i spent the next 6 hours recovering data from that nearly doomed drive... got 70% back plus stuff from the drive's first life, who knew.
Since then, I do ONE drive format at a time. In addition, all uber critical files are kept on a RAID5 linux server (dupe files are all ove the place as the really important stuff dsoesn't exceed 50MB.
Oh yeah, and any maintenance to the server follows the following procedure:
shutdown samba/NFS.
unmount raid array.
stop raid array.
backup raidtab.
learned my lesson.
I live in SW FLA, 6 months out of the year the outdoors is pretty much uninhabitable (humidity 100%, 90-100 deg. F, time to burn =10 minutes w/o sunscreen and afternoon thunderstorms + big bugs...), the other 6 is's either muggy, or cold. only for 2 months or so is it really 'nice' IMO. That and with my sensitivity to light (a geek who lives in a cave... thats a new one) and general dislike of the outdoors (parents took me on a mountain hike of some 5 miles when i was 2, they didn't know it was that long... hated outdoor activity since), and i don't do outdoor sports. I bowl, quite well i say. I watch Football and baseball and hockey on TV and go to the occasional game in Tampa.
Methinks within 30 years, however, pro sports will be on the decline, as the demographic of the average sports viewer isn't getting any younger.
I used to be a 100% windows user, ntil i put together, with the help of the local linux guru/LAN party hosting guy, a linux based file server, i needed RAID, didnt have a controller card and had no use for a gui on a headless box.
the box was red hat 8.
in the past 9 months i've become much more intimatly familiar with *nix. My router is linux, and i just deployed two new boxes, one of them a dual boot with Win2k (for gaming). Only one of the three nix boxes has a GUI, and that right now is KDE. Granted it's a bit klunky compared to Win2k's, in fact ir reminds me more of Windows 95's desktop. Win2k's file manager/web browser/ftp client combo is nice, just type in a different address, but it has many, many, many bugs and holes.
I toyed with the idea of setting up a nix box for my parents, just mozilla, evo and OO.o. until i found out that they needed Quicken 2003 (Crossover didnt deliver).
In any case, I like nix better for some things, windows for others. Is nix suitable for use by the general population? no. it took me 6 months to shake windows logic, the gneral populus would keel over and die, at the least they'd be screaming mad.
I've used Winamp 2.91 for ages, I HATE 3 with a passion, so dang unstable. I wonder if statbar will support winamp 5 controls ;)
this thing liike interesting.
I've gotten into XMMS 1.2.8 in linux, that is when my sound works (gentoo + 2.4 + alsa + audigy != work ;( )
of course, mpg123 and cmix work from a console too, especally over SSH.
i'll grab 5 as soon as i get the opportunity. looks good to me.
i'm to the SE in Sarasota thanks to my parents, heh. Also a proud owner of GTA-VC. haitian violence prone? hell no.
these people need to get their heads outta their asses.
nice to see they still make that sucker, mine's developing a phantom left-click.
nice and big, though i just use my middle + index on the top and thumb/ring on the side buttons, i use em to strafe in FPS's.
I have seen 2.5 OBSG episodes before seeing the new miniseries.
:-D
I LOVE IT!!!
Starbuck rocks
Where's my series?
this looks like a way to knock down the cost of the subscription.
:)
1) pay $x fee
2) you make content
3) you sell stuff
4) you get real $y
5) you $(x-y) fee (minimum is there)
6) goto 1
definatly something i've been looking into, i'll grab it when i get a CC and some time after the first of the year
remember Freelancer?
A few familiar faces and names from the SF&F genre showed up in that game (John Rhys-Davies and George Takei at least) I was quite surprised.
They need more hollywood talent in the game industry, there have been some well written games out there (Freelancer had a VERY compelling single player campaign).
If they can get away from the liscensing and into actually using real talent (writers, actors) then the industry will get mainstream recognition. Though these hollywood types are DEFINATLY gonna need at attitude adjustment if they are gonna do games. Mabye Wil Wheaton could do something (j/k... or not?)
I started a corporation 2 years ago (well, started it with my dad's help anyways, i was 16 at the time), doing consulting/technical work for local residential and commercial customers. It's VERY small scale and VERY word-of-mouth. I have at least one job a week (paying $40-$80, decent for a H.S. senior working 2 hours a week). I level with my customers, since everything is one-on-one, it teaches you MANY things, the customer is always right... as long as they know what they're talking about. An irate client will think something is wrong when they don't understand things. make them understand. In the past two years, I've had ONE botched client, and I was the one who screwed up, he was my first client in over three months, and wanted to upgrade his (very slow) box, i saw $$$ and went to work trying to milk him for money. the plan backfired. Fortunatly my reputation was not damaged. If you're just starting out, make sure you have cash to live off of for two years. in my case, I'm living at home, this all expenses are paid for. A relaxed atmosphere works wonders, even though i'm a one-man op, i cannot see it staying that way. Timely E-mail replies are key, as others said, phone support is also a must. When someone calls me with a problem and explains it in their limited way, I offer to come out and take a look, instead of: 1) they explain things vaguely 2) you try to gather more specific information, irritating the customer who is confused 3) you try a solution, they get confused and Irate. 4) you finaly suggest you send someone to take a looksee, they, already in a bad mood, and having had much time wasted, insist on asking how many $$$ it'll cost, and reject it 5) you wind up losing a client Proper way of doing things: 1) they explain things vaguely 2) get more info by asking what programs are acting up 3) offer to go out/send someone to take a look at the problem, ask them when is covenient, most residential customers will accept a 24 hour delay, depends on when the call was recieved if pulling same day (Do not charge extra for same-day service). 4)Client will accept, and spend the money because they are in a good mood (your quick willingness to cut to the chase) 5) client tells friends about your good service 6) Profit!!! be friendly, above all, if you get 'my cupholder is broken' level stuff, be calm, and immediatly say you'll come and fix/take a look at it, put them at ease ASAP. Drop business cards with every client, let your good service sell for you (one res.client referred my services to three others, I've gotten ove $1500 from that single referral. Another business client helped, too, I do the support for the office staff's home boxes now too :)
And don't be money hungry, quick fixes backfire.
indeed the only way to crack the damn thing is to hack the password, the dialog locks out after several attempt to prevent brute-forcing.
there is a guy in my net studies class who works a bit for the IT guys, and thus knows the password. But like any government drone, he remains mum about it. And whenever comfronting the sysadmin, he conviently skirts around any issues relationg to DF... gee, i wonder whats up with that.
This box here at school (along with a few hundred others) has Deepfreeze.
:(
the BANE of us geeks, we can't fiddle and tweak with our boxen cuz the night classes have newbies *sigh*
Deepfreeze works at the MBR level, only way to circumvent it to blow the HD away (i.e. write zeros across it and sector zero.)
easy way around that is a password on the bios (also on these boxers) to prevent alt boot sources
A big honkin' Master lock on the covers keeps us from getting at the bios reflash jumpers, i.e these boxes are both idiot and GEEK proof
Deep Freeze + Ghost/DeployCenter is your FRIEND, just have 1 box be a dummy (i.e. no students fsck with it), get updates, make image, thten push over the network.
But be DAMN sure that it's PERFECT, at the beginning of the school year, fresh image contained the blaster worm, and with deepfreeze the fix didn't work. IT didn't give us the access codes for Deep Freeze so we used royally fucked up boxes for 3 weeks while a new image was made (yes, it took three weeks to: nuke a HD, load initial GHOST image, add new stuff, make new image, reimage rest of boxen). server core here in win2000, sucks ass. though we did get 4 Dual Xeon servers on the cheap. from Arthur Andersen when they went bye bye.
Great ideas for my PII-350/384M/4GB box, currently running Win2k (torrent/P2P/IRC idleman/MP3) running on an old ass packard hell 640x480x60hz radiation generator. VNC is available, but slow (i keep it at 32 bit color, why i don't know). I want to switch it to nix, probably slackware, and will need a WM.
Boxes: 7
M$: 2.5
*nix: 4.5
screen real estate: not enough.
--
I use samba to share my files so i can't comment on NFS too much.
Similar setup:
one Linux file server, 3 desktops (mixed nix and win2k), when the server shuts down, any cients active go nuts (winamp freezes, explorer complains about the sudden disconnect)
best theing to do, since you're on a home network is to make sure no one's using the damn thing before you shut it down.
This is easy, even with 6 systems, (assuming samba), just make sure no programs are activly using the shares and reboot the box, the workstations will yelp in agony, until the server returns, then all's well.
In windows, when a mounted (read: drive mapped) smb share goes off line, windows complains, programs too, then windows marks the drive as disconnected, when the server's back up, reconnectying by just clicking the drive in My Computer restores everything to normal. I haven't messed with client side SMB under nix enough to know what happens when a samba server reboots (gracefully or otherwise) while files are in use client side.
--
My 6 year old TI-30 has taken a beating. Don't have a TI-8x yet, but getting one, need more firepower :)
it's been dropped, stepped on, smashed, slammed against desks, etc and keeps working.
i also have a 128MB flash drive thats very small (just the chip with some really hard clear yellow tinted plastic around it), the cap has a small fracture and the keyring piece broke off (weakest link), but it's been dropped from desk height onto concrete numerous times.
S.O.P. at one of the school i go to (i'm a student tech aide at both) with new/malfunc box 1) wdclear, install ghost image other school (the 'sysadmins' don't know a switch from a hub from a router, know nothing of bandwidth (tried to push ten ghost images over the same segment of a 10 megabit unswitched lan and wondered why it took 18 hours to run...) 1) get new box, add programs, deploy malfunc: bring box in, troubleshoot, reinstall from winXP install disk 2) install wrong drivers from driver disk (they all look alike, and they can't keep things straight) 3) make me spend 2 hours fixing their screwups, the so called windows tech cant do a driver install on xp to save his life, and the mac guru thinks entering an 8 character string in dos is way too complicated to the point of it being the 'wrong' way.
RA1... WINE? WOOHOO!!!!! i just fired up mandrake 9.1 3 days ago, i've been using red hat 8 in server mode for a long time now, and 2000 for my desktop which stubbornly refuses to run RA. what about multiplayer? IPX i assume works, if the kernel is set up to use it, or does it do TCP/IP?
I had to use data recovery software a few years back after I accidentally started a NTFS format on a drive I was using as a temporary storage dump while the main drives were being upgraded... got back only 70% after a 3% format :( took hours too.
/mnt/snafu
.avi .mpg and .mp3, the rest are programs, docs, etc. all of which easily fit elsewhere (the actual "mission critical" files can fit on a single CD, and therefore anywhere on my LAN) even with RAID, there's no excuse for a good backup, RAID does mechanical failures, but an errant rm -rf very mportantdir/veryimportantfile
Best advice here is to keep active backups (Tape/CD is good for archival), if the files are small (docs/text/logs/source code), HD space is dirt cheap, get another drive (or partition)
mount as something like
and set rsync/cron/whatever to copy the files from the open (shared) partition to the snafu drive (something thats only writable (and therefore screwable by root and not your backup op or your regular user type) I'm sure there are more advanced way to do it, like say on the fly, but setting a cron script to run every 5 minutes and unless you go straight into doing CD backups 5 within 5 minutes of copying data to the drive, you're OK.
I have a shitload of files, most of them size-wise are
is hard to recover from, if doing backups to media, MAKE SURE that they're duped on the HD first, in case something like this happens to you, a quick tar -czvf stufftobackup.tgz [your files here] before you run your backup will save your ass, better yet, make the tar, then just back that up, don't screw around with the originals where possible.
I need to get my hands on a Ti-8x calculator, Algebra II trig/Calc will kill my aging Ti-30.
I like the Ti30, simple scientific calc, single line display though, and with anything higher than algebra 1 type stuff you REALLY need more firepower (I should have gotten one three years ago, I see they haven't dropped in price at all).
I'm all for the TI's.
the first 'language' (yes, i know, not a real programming language per se) that I learned whatn i was right around that age was HTML, it introduces the logic process common to programming, and once she has HTML down, CSS, and PHP is easy to add in. PHP of course paves the way for the bigger languages. HTML is VERY visual which helps the first time learner (especially a child).
:) OK, mabye not, but
DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE HER! show her HTML now, and she'll be outdoing you in C+ database apps at 16
HTML->PHP->MySQL->[insert DB here]
|->Perl->BASH
|->C+
Besides, the more X chromosomes we have in the geek gene pool, the better, we need more people like that, makes fewer ignorant people in the world.
This TV season is really the first that I'm watching my favorite shows off of BT rather than the TV.
I watch 10 hours of Prime time per week
4 hours of that is SG-1 on sci-fi monday nights (until my DVD/RIP collection is complete).
the rest is:
NCIS (CBS tuesday)
Smallville (WB wednesday)
Enterprise (BT, wed. runs alongside Smallville)
JAG (CBS friday)
1 hour FOX sunday
most shows I watch on BT, skipping the damn commercials. most are highly annoying anyhow, local car peddlers, drugs and M$FT...
Granted some are hilarious, MGD, Bud and Aflac rarely disappoint in the humor department, but the rest REALLY GET ON MY NERVES!
With the average ENT episode clocking in at 42:30 with intro/end credits (the last 60s are the end creds which on broadcast are always overlapped by ads anyway that means... 18:30 of commercials (17:30 not counting the end creds overlay). frankly, thats obsurd, and 10:00 of that are the same damn ads over and over and over and over again. i don't have TiVo, but i do have BT, the next best thing IMO considering i do have the bandwidth and time (and don't EVER tell me that i'm getting them for free, bandwidth costs $$$, time is also a huge ass commodity.
hmm, I like this idea. I've been a baseball fan for years, and remember playing some of the earliest sports games (on the intellivision, no less).
Having a group of 18 sounds like fun, and if anyone leaves, dummy bot takes his place until someone else comes online.
Gonna check it out once I get home.
I've been riding the wave of the technology revolution for the past thirteen years, seen the good and the bad (in that order) of computing in the classroom.
:) We got a computer (a 386DX running DOS 5 and Windows 3.0) the next week, thus beginning my rise into geekdom.
:)
When I started Kindergarten, 1990, the classroom (district: SRQ, FLA) of ~30 was teamed up with 60 more 1st and 2nd graders who, besides collaborating on projects, shared a classroom that was equipped with filmstrip, overhead/opaque projectors and a Laserdisc player (each room had a CCTV to get 'beamed' VHS tapes from the media center too). in this room, there was also a set of 25-30 Apple IIc's (with speach synths, 5.25/3.5" drives and color monitors) powered by a Mac classic. I was the only student among the 90 who figured out what 'user name' and 'password' were on the login prompts, the third week or so of school, i saw a few boxes at this prompt, and proceded to enter my name... no luck (remember, I was 6 at the time), then saw a number on the top of the monitors, typed that in. It worked. And when open house came around, the teacher sent me to the lab to power it up, much to my parent's surprise (we didn't evn have a computer at the time), I was running that place
Two years later, I transferred schools, the classroom has a single Apple IIe, monochrome + 2x5.25 drives. quite a step back. Again, I took over, keeping the disks safe from harm and the system running. trips to the computer Lab (20+ of the same) were likewise
the following year or so, after I left they got some nice powermacs.
moving up, later in 2nd grade (transferred again, this time to the big 'Gifted' school), found a lab full of LCII and LCIII macs, I knew more than every student in the 2nd grade, and debunked a few misnomers the teachers tried to peddle (also thwarted the typing nazi's with my 25 WPM one handed). Later, in the 4th grade I befriended the Programming/Astronomy teacher who ran a lab of 486's e/ Win95. The school was 90% MAC otherwise, but I kept on top of things.
The teachers who had computers in their classrooms occasionally used them for teaching, but this was when they were still primative (best you could do is pipe the signal to a TV), and thus wern't used as a crutch... yet.
6th grade, and a new school, LCII's and one very nice PowerPC in the room, during that year I befriended the technology facilitator (think 50% sysadmin, 25% helpdesk, 15% drone and 5% teacher) who put me to work inspecting networking cables (not all boxes had ethernet lines properly installed). We got internet connectivity later that year, along with the vaunted AR (Accelerated Reader) program, used as a big fat crutch for taching reading comprehension (it assigned books 'points' and a 'grade level' based on the size and complexity of the book, passing a test gave you points, which if accumulated could be used to 'buy' prizes, thus the student's feeble and porous minds think "Books == points == reward"
I rarely used the thing, and still read books like H2G2, 2001, 2010, and lots of verne and HG Wells all in 6th grade and throughout middle school).
7th grade saw my first technologically immersed classroom. the gifted pilot program at the school (of which I was in the flagship class) paid off, with 4 new classrooms, 3 of which had 4 brand spanking new All-in-one G3's with OS 8, and the 4th room (the science lab) had 8 of these machines! one box to every 4 students. Having a handicap (and the IEP that went with it), and a little sucking up to the teacher got me my own box (#8). The G3's wern't used as a crutch, the class was lab intensive but all were done in the real world, the computer served as a resource (information, Word processor, etc) and as a toy, occasionally. (after a given assignment was completed, the give group coould play games (which were, thankfully science related, Gizmo's and Gadgets being one (basic mechanical and electrical principles) and Simcity 2000 being the other
perhaps WF put some (not-so)spyware on their machines, and if they logon to the net, BAM! the IP address is made, and a traceroute grabs the identity of the gateway router, whois gets the ISP's info, tell the cops and you get one busted criminal.