When the earth was created, the great God above, Gave each one a profession to work at and love.
He made doctors, lawyers, plumbers and then, He made carpenters, singers and confidence men. And when each had a job to work at as he should, He looked them all over and saw it was good.
He was just sitting down to rest for the day, When a horrible groan chanced his way. The Lord then looked, and his eyes opened wide, For a motley collection of bums stood outside.
"Oh what can they want?" The Creator asked, "Help us," they cried out, "We don t have a task!" "We have no profession." They cried in dismay, "And even the jails have turned us away."
Said the Lord, "I have seen many things without worth, But here I find gathered the scum of the earth!" The Lord was perplexed. . . . . And then He was mad. For the jobs were all taken, there were none to be had.
Then he spoke to them all in a deep angry tone, "For ever and ever ye mongrels shall roam. Ye shall freeze in the summer and sweat when it's cold, Ye shall work in computer rooms - dirty and old.
Ye shall slave in the dungeons where large servers lay, Ye shall be hounded by users, while you work thru the day. Ye shall work late and on weekends, and not make your worth, Ye shall be blamed for all the downtime on earth.
Ye shall watch all the glory go to management and sales, Ye shall be blamed by them both if the damn system fails. Ye shall be paid nothing for all your sorrow and tears, Your hair shall turn grey as you slave through the years.
With no warning, upgrades and changes will appear, Crashes and file checks will bring you to tears. Your users will assume their needs will come first, As SYSTEM ADMINISTRATORS, Ye shall forever be cursed!"
For my business Win2K does everything and is extremely stable after years of tweaking it in. Recently, one of our boxes had a power supply failure that resulted in a new power supply, mother board, CPU, Video Card (new AGP socket), new RAM, CD/DVD drive and we added another hard drive since the box was down anyway. We rebooted and Win2K just asked for the new drivers.
We were back up in less than a day without having to do any reinstalls of software. The best part is that we didn't need a new license! I seriously doubt if XP would allow that many hardware changes without buying a new license.
We purchased another workstation about a year ago that came with Windows XP on it and it ran extremely slow compared to the Win2K system. Many of our third-party programs refused to install or even run. We purchased another Win2K package and installed it and the performance jumped up significantly! Third-party programs installed and ran properly. We were back in business.
I can't justify going to XP because:
it would be expensive
each box would take days to reinstall
not all our software will even run on XP
there would be a reduction in performance requiring more boxes and licenses
there's nothing wrong with our current setup
Obviously, Redmond hasn't got a clue about their customer and if they do, they obviously don't care.
Database & data warehouse, file servers, mail and web servers and such all run on Linux or BSD. Once third party vendors start to port their apps to Linux, we would be extremely happy to migrate away from Windows all together. A lot of Open Source is there but not enough yet. Many in-house programs are already ported to the Linux systems.
We'll stay with Win2K even after it has past "End-of-Life" because, if it ain't broke - Don't fix it!
My Windoze box has been running 2k for years. It just keeps chugging along without reboots day after day, week after week,... I tried XP Home on my 1.3 GHz 1GB Ram box and XP was sooooo slow that it didn't last 3 days before I dug out the 2K CD and reinstalled the "Good" windoze OS. As a windoze box, it's as stable as a rock and never gives me any problems. It's fast and reliable.
When I upgraded most of the hardware, it booted, prompted me for drivers and kept on going without a reinstall. I changed the mother board, CPU, video card, power supply, RAM, added a DVD drive and another hard drive and all it wanted was new drivers. Try that many changes on XP and you'll need to purchase the OS again.
I'll run Win2K for as long as I can or until M$ puts out something better. XP is a dog compared to Win2K. I also run SUSE Linux and Solaris but some apps and games require Windoze. Real work requires a *nix box.
The European Union (EU) is after Microsoft in a big way. The EU wants them to enable operability with other systems. The timing is such that these may be interrelated.
Commenting on the incident, Baltimore County police spokesman Bill Toohey told the Sun: "It's a sign that we're all a little nervous in the post-9/11 world."
I'm sure that using legitimate $2 bills is a threat to national security! How many people have been killed by a $2 bill?
That's a pretty lame excuse by the police department. Surely they could come up with something a bit more creative.
Along the branch of the Lisp tree there was a wonderful development environment called Interlisp and Interlisp-D that were extremely easy to program and work with.
The Interlisp environments had variants built upon them like Notecards.
In the Lisp branches of both maps, the Interlisp variant is missing.
Venue had the Interlisp version Koto ported to the x86 platforms and it performed reasonably well.
Later versions of Interlisp could incorporate common lisp, Prologue and Interlisp all in one package that could compile and run programs built on all three.
I've tried calling cards but beyond being a pain, never being able to hear the other side or they couldn't hear me, running out of time and such, I gave up on them.
I tried different card companies and they were all about the same. I tried various telcos but their fees were too high so, it's back to AT&T.
I signed up for the AT&T International plan that costs about $2.95 a month and we make calls that always go through, the quality is always good and there just aren't any problems. The cost is reasonable so I'll stay here until something better comes along.
Don't use a scanner! The resolution for slides will just plain suck.
If you're a professional photographer, get a pro grade digital camera with as many megapixels as you can afford. There are some great high-end cameras out there now.
Get one that uses interchangable lenses (pro grade). Buy a MACRO lens and make your own extension for it. Use a tube (flat black on the inside) and mount a slide carrier to one end. Mount the other to the Macro lens. Be sure there are no light leaks!
Now you can photograph your slides with your digital camera. You can alter the light by using the sky and clouds as a back drop or just use any color-temp light you want for slide illumination. Many over/under exposed slides are easily corrected. Also, if you made it right, you can adjust the macro setting and crop your slides.
It's easy to make, cheap and yields great results!
Then use GIMP or whatever. BTW, XV is great at color balance shifting and runs great on Linux. It's an older program but copies still are found in various linux/unix distros.
Yes, I want a car with a crash built in. I bet my insurance company does too! their systems are always down and they run Windoze so I can just see the look on their faces when somebody tells them they bought a car with Windoze built in. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha....Not this fool. Can we swap out the OS for Linux or BSD or BeOS or anything?
Things aren't much different in Moscow, St. Petersburg or even Kiev, Ukraine. Pay is low and although you report around $240 per month, it is actually much less than that. Legitimate CDs cost more - typical European prices of $18-$20 USD. Basically, legitimate music is just not affordable in Russia or Ukraine. It the music was priced affordably, much of the problem would just go away but as long as the record industry keeps the prices out of reach of the common people, it will be there to stay. With the rouble at almost 30:1 USD, think of a $20 CD as costing around 600 R. No, how many CDs would you buy that cost $600 each? This isn't rocket science - it's economics.
After Windoze, I install:
1 Office
2 All updates and patches
3 RTV Reco to avoid those annoying "Are you sure..."
4 Anti-Virus and updates
5 Naviscope
6 BlackIce
7 Sygate
8 E-mail program (I Never use Outlook*)
9 Exceed (to access Linux and Solaris) 10 The graphics, music, video and other Multi-media software.
If this is real, the M$ anti-trust judge should also get a copy. Remember, they are monitoring what M$ is doing still. If the intent is to eliminate competition, that's illegal.
I just looked at the new $20s and there is definitely something dark right near the right eye (slightly above and to the right). It isn't a solid object however. The dark spot isn't on the front or back of the bill but in the middle of the paper. I looked at several of the bills and noticed it was on all of them that I have.
Could this be the "paint" type RFID? I didn't think the technology was accurate enough to determine exact serial numbers with the magnetic ink type RFID.
I don't know what it is but its in the right place but it doesn't look like anything that would blow up in a microwave.
Interesting comments by many who obviously have never been in Russia or any of the CIS states. The USSR hasn't existed for a long time. Russia is a fabulous country from what I've seen of it (geeze, it spans 7 timezones!).
There are basically three classes of people - the Rich, the normal and the out-of-work poor. The latter constitutes a significant part of the population which, is very sad.
The people are very proud but bothered by the current state of affairs there. But, they are probably more interested in politics than Americans are. They really know and understand their history and the present. They've lived through hell with Stalin and yet continue on.
So please don't slam Russia unless you've been there. It is very obvious that most of the statements about Russia or the old USSR are by people who don't know what they're writing about.
If I read Amendment 2 correctly, all rights went away when the old SCO sold themselves. Also the Attachment E lists primarily manuals and docs - not sources and copyrights.
Ah, right. No due process of law to confiscate another person's property. No judicial review. No warrant. Just a hunch. And...Maybe the property isn't illegal but take it anyway.
I thought we had a Constitution in this country that prohibits such things. I think I read something called Article IV that said something like, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
I write some code for a particular application. It works perfectly there for that purpose. Then, some manager decides he wants it for an unintended application and runs it there. It fails miserably in that environment and I'm on the hook because somebody misused some software I wrote. NOT!
Also, if that same software is intended for a specific computing environment and that environment isn't configured per the requirements of the software and it then has holes all through it but I'm on the hook. NOT!
There is no way to make this concept work -- putting 100% of the blame on **ANY** security problem directly on the shoulders of a programmer or team of programmers who actually built a good program that was used badly.
This must have been suggested by a bunch of litigation lawyers or insurance companies. There are many industries that require all kinds of insurance to be in business (real estate, etc.) but those premiums are rarely, if ever used in actual practice.
I don't see any way to make what is described in the SD article work in real life.
Question 10 says low price/High Effort or High price/low effort. Where is the low price/low effort option? Why did they leave out the only true answer?
Question 11 says easy setup/hard admin or difficult setup/easy admin. Again, where is easy setup/easy admin? Again they left out the only true answer.
There are just a few reasons to run Linux instead of Windoze.
1. I can back up and restore the entire box effortlessly. You can't do a full disk backup on Windoze that I know about. There is even a page on the M$ site that says it can't be done.
2. Security Security Security
3. Stability Stability Stability
4. I don't need to reboot after every little change with Linux.
5. Patches and upgrades don't render existing services and applications broken and require days or weeks to recover.
That's enough for me to keep using Linux/Solaris/*nix systems.
A company I recently did some work for has a Sperry Univac on-line as a backup for a "critical government system". They search computer junk-yards for spare parts. They say the problem is that the software will take forever to port and qualify on a new system. I guess I never understood why they didn't start that process, say 10 years ago.
The court did not rule on the constitutionality of the subpoena process and left that question open. The court also said that there is a giant loophole that remains open. So, until the constitutionality question gets addressed, we're all still in a state of limbo.
Re:Solaris 10 x86 - from the September Inquirer
on
Solaris 9 x86 Review
·
· Score: 1
I've got the CDs here and I burned them on 8/12. Granted, I'm on a Sun distro but I downloaded this some time ago and its running on a box next to my Linux box. If it's a beta, they should indicate it as such.
Slashdot Mirror
An oldie but a goodie...
The Curse of Systems Administrators
When the earth was created, the great God above,
Gave each one a profession to work at and love.
He made doctors, lawyers, plumbers and then,
He made carpenters, singers and confidence men.
And when each had a job to work at as he should,
He looked them all over and saw it was good.
He was just sitting down to rest for the day,
When a horrible groan chanced his way.
The Lord then looked, and his eyes opened wide,
For a motley collection of bums stood outside.
"Oh what can they want?" The Creator asked,
"Help us," they cried out, "We don t have a task!"
"We have no profession." They cried in dismay,
"And even the jails have turned us away."
Said the Lord, "I have seen many things without worth,
But here I find gathered the scum of the earth!"
The Lord was perplexed. . . . . And then He was mad.
For the jobs were all taken, there were none to be had.
Then he spoke to them all in a deep angry tone,
"For ever and ever ye mongrels shall roam.
Ye shall freeze in the summer and sweat when it's cold,
Ye shall work in computer rooms - dirty and old.
Ye shall slave in the dungeons where large servers lay,
Ye shall be hounded by users, while you work thru the day.
Ye shall work late and on weekends, and not make your worth,
Ye shall be blamed for all the downtime on earth.
Ye shall watch all the glory go to management and sales,
Ye shall be blamed by them both if the damn system fails.
Ye shall be paid nothing for all your sorrow and tears,
Your hair shall turn grey as you slave through the years.
With no warning, upgrades and changes will appear,
Crashes and file checks will bring you to tears.
Your users will assume their needs will come first,
As SYSTEM ADMINISTRATORS, Ye shall forever be cursed!"
We were back up in less than a day without having to do any reinstalls of software. The best part is that we didn't need a new license! I seriously doubt if XP would allow that many hardware changes without buying a new license.
We purchased another workstation about a year ago that came with Windows XP on it and it ran extremely slow compared to the Win2K system. Many of our third-party programs refused to install or even run. We purchased another Win2K package and installed it and the performance jumped up significantly! Third-party programs installed and ran properly. We were back in business.
I can't justify going to XP because:
Obviously, Redmond hasn't got a clue about their customer and if they do, they obviously don't care.
Database & data warehouse, file servers, mail and web servers and such all run on Linux or BSD. Once third party vendors start to port their apps to Linux, we would be extremely happy to migrate away from Windows all together. A lot of Open Source is there but not enough yet. Many in-house programs are already ported to the Linux systems.
We'll stay with Win2K even after it has past "End-of-Life" because, if it ain't broke - Don't fix it!
My Windoze box has been running 2k for years. It just keeps chugging along without reboots day after day, week after week,... I tried XP Home on my 1.3 GHz 1GB Ram box and XP was sooooo slow that it didn't last 3 days before I dug out the 2K CD and reinstalled the "Good" windoze OS. As a windoze box, it's as stable as a rock and never gives me any problems. It's fast and reliable.
When I upgraded most of the hardware, it booted, prompted me for drivers and kept on going without a reinstall. I changed the mother board, CPU, video card, power supply, RAM, added a DVD drive and another hard drive and all it wanted was new drivers. Try that many changes on XP and you'll need to purchase the OS again.
I'll run Win2K for as long as I can or until M$ puts out something better. XP is a dog compared to Win2K. I also run SUSE Linux and Solaris but some apps and games require Windoze. Real work requires a *nix box.
The European Union (EU) is after Microsoft in a big way. The EU wants them to enable operability with other systems. The timing is such that these may be interrelated.
*That's Free as in Freedom - not free as in beer!
The first Point and Click user interface was a .44
Colt
I'm sure that using legitimate $2 bills is a threat to national security! How many people have been killed by a $2 bill?
That's a pretty lame excuse by the police department. Surely they could come up with something a bit more creative.
Along the branch of the Lisp tree there was a wonderful development environment called Interlisp and Interlisp-D that were extremely easy to program and work with.
The Interlisp environments had variants built upon them like Notecards.
In the Lisp branches of both maps, the Interlisp variant is missing.
Venue had the Interlisp version Koto ported to the x86 platforms and it performed reasonably well.
Later versions of Interlisp could incorporate common lisp, Prologue and Interlisp all in one package that could compile and run programs built on all three.
I've tried calling cards but beyond being a pain, never being able to hear the other side or they couldn't hear me, running out of time and such, I gave up on them.
I tried different card companies and they were all about the same. I tried various telcos but their fees were too high so, it's back to AT&T.
I signed up for the AT&T International plan that costs about $2.95 a month and we make calls that always go through, the quality is always good and there just aren't any problems. The cost is reasonable so I'll stay here until something better comes along.
Don't use a scanner! The resolution for slides will just plain suck.
If you're a professional photographer, get a pro grade digital camera with as many megapixels as you can afford. There are some great high-end cameras out there now.
Get one that uses interchangable lenses (pro grade). Buy a MACRO lens and make your own extension for it. Use a tube (flat black on the inside) and mount a slide carrier to one end. Mount the other to the Macro lens. Be sure there are no light leaks!
Now you can photograph your slides with your digital camera. You can alter the light by using the sky and clouds as a back drop or just use any color-temp light you want for slide illumination. Many over/under exposed slides are easily corrected. Also, if you made it right, you can adjust the macro setting and crop your slides.
It's easy to make, cheap and yields great results!
Then use GIMP or whatever. BTW, XV is great at color balance shifting and runs great on Linux. It's an older program but copies still are found in various linux/unix distros.
Yes, I want a car with a crash built in. I bet my insurance company does too! their systems are always down and they run Windoze so I can just see the look on their faces when somebody tells them they bought a car with Windoze built in. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha....Not this fool. Can we swap out the OS for Linux or BSD or BeOS or anything?
Things aren't much different in Moscow, St. Petersburg or even Kiev, Ukraine. Pay is low and although you report around $240 per month, it is actually much less than that. Legitimate CDs cost more - typical European prices of $18-$20 USD. Basically, legitimate music is just not affordable in Russia or Ukraine. It the music was priced affordably, much of the problem would just go away but as long as the record industry keeps the prices out of reach of the common people, it will be there to stay. With the rouble at almost 30:1 USD, think of a $20 CD as costing around 600 R. No, how many CDs would you buy that cost $600 each? This isn't rocket science - it's economics.
After Windoze, I install:
1 Office
2 All updates and patches
3 RTV Reco to avoid those annoying "Are you sure..."
4 Anti-Virus and updates
5 Naviscope
6 BlackIce
7 Sygate
8 E-mail program (I Never use Outlook*)
9 Exceed (to access Linux and Solaris)
10 The graphics, music, video and other Multi-media software.
If this is real, the M$ anti-trust judge should also get a copy. Remember, they are monitoring what M$ is doing still. If the intent is to eliminate competition, that's illegal.
So what happens next? Where do we go from here?
I just looked at the new $20s and there is definitely something dark right near the right eye (slightly above and to the right). It isn't a solid object however. The dark spot isn't on the front or back of the bill but in the middle of the paper. I looked at several of the bills and noticed it was on all of them that I have.
Could this be the "paint" type RFID? I didn't think the technology was accurate enough to determine exact serial numbers with the magnetic ink type RFID.
I don't know what it is but its in the right place but it doesn't look like anything that would blow up in a microwave.
Interesting comments by many who obviously have never been in Russia or any of the CIS states. The USSR hasn't existed for a long time. Russia is a fabulous country from what I've seen of it (geeze, it spans 7 timezones!).
There are basically three classes of people - the Rich, the normal and the out-of-work poor. The latter constitutes a significant part of the population which, is very sad.
The people are very proud but bothered by the current state of affairs there. But, they are probably more interested in politics than Americans are. They really know and understand their history and the present. They've lived through hell with Stalin and yet continue on.
So please don't slam Russia unless you've been there. It is very obvious that most of the statements about Russia or the old USSR are by people who don't know what they're writing about.
If I read Amendment 2 correctly, all rights went away when the old SCO sold themselves. Also the Attachment E lists primarily manuals and docs - not sources and copyrights.
They should read these themselves (grin>
Ah, right. No due process of law to confiscate another person's property. No judicial review. No warrant. Just a hunch. And...Maybe the property isn't illegal but take it anyway.
I thought we had a Constitution in this country that prohibits such things. I think I read something called Article IV that said something like, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
I guess the RIAA SWAT Team hasn't read that yet.
I write some code for a particular application. It works perfectly there for that purpose. Then, some manager decides he wants it for an unintended application and runs it there. It fails miserably in that environment and I'm on the hook because somebody misused some software I wrote. NOT!
Also, if that same software is intended for a specific computing environment and that environment isn't configured per the requirements of the software and it then has holes all through it but I'm on the hook. NOT!
There is no way to make this concept work -- putting 100% of the blame on **ANY** security problem directly on the shoulders of a programmer or team of programmers who actually built a good program that was used badly.
This must have been suggested by a bunch of litigation lawyers or insurance companies. There are many industries that require all kinds of insurance to be in business (real estate, etc.) but those premiums are rarely, if ever used in actual practice.
I don't see any way to make what is described in the SD article work in real life.
Question 10 says low price/High Effort or High price/low effort. Where is the low price/low effort option? Why did they leave out the only true answer?
Question 11 says easy setup/hard admin or difficult setup/easy admin. Again, where is easy setup/easy admin? Again they left out the only true answer.
There are just a few reasons to run Linux instead of Windoze.
1. I can back up and restore the entire box effortlessly. You can't do a full disk backup on Windoze that I know about. There is even a page on the M$ site that says it can't be done.
2. Security Security Security
3. Stability Stability Stability
4. I don't need to reboot after every little change with Linux.
5. Patches and upgrades don't render existing services and applications broken and require days or weeks to recover.
That's enough for me to keep using Linux/Solaris/*nix systems.
A company I recently did some work for has a Sperry Univac on-line as a backup for a "critical government system". They search computer junk-yards for spare parts. They say the problem is that the software will take forever to port and qualify on a new system. I guess I never understood why they didn't start that process, say 10 years ago.
The court did not rule on the constitutionality of the subpoena process and left that question open. The court also said that there is a giant loophole that remains open. So, until the constitutionality question gets addressed, we're all still in a state of limbo.
Solaris 10 x86 free downloads reinstated
Free for personal use, $90/yr with support.
I've got the CDs here and I burned them on 8/12. Granted, I'm on a Sun distro but I downloaded this some time ago and its running on a box next to my Linux box. If it's a beta, they should indicate it as such.