At headquarters (not where I work) all the labs have a 2 inch my half copper bar running all the way around the lab. Battery cables (8 gauge or better (smaller)) is connected from that to every workstation. This assues a common ground and helps to avoid problems. As someone else mentioned, you can duplicate the same thing yourself)
Ground fault interupters (which in the US are required in bathrooms and kitchens. often called GFCI) do not protect look at the ground wire, if any current goes through the ground wire the GFCI should trip. I suspect that if you pluged the bad equipment into a GFCI it would trip.
Grounding is complex, electrical engineers can take senior level courses on grounds. Don't think that you will learn all you need to konw about them here.
Make sure all your grounds are tied togather, doing the best you can to be sure of the connection. Beware that wires can induce current into your ground (transformer work on this principal) just by running close to it.
If you leave the mains ground connected to your equipment, make sure your ground and the mains ground are tied togather. Don't trust a water pipe, use a real ground. Make sure if you try this that the connections on the mains ground is good everywhere.
If you have two different stakes in the ground, you can make a battery, which is short circuted when you connect the two togather. There are other problems, but in generally it isn't a bad thing to have two ground stakes.
Re:Why the bitterness?
on
Cool PC Cases
·
· Score: 1
I'm bitter about pickup trucks too. Trucks should be square, tough (as in drop a 1000 lbs rock in the back end and get out of there) and have real transmissions.
I can't beleive the people who fall for the sexy marketing. They are work vehicals, not toys. The Dogde gets more horsepower from the automatic transmission because they take away the torque from the low end. Pickups are about torque not horsepower, they use too much fuel as it willout bruning it away in too low a gear for the speed you are taking.
Which is why My comptuer is in a corner where I can't see it. I look at the monitor, listen to the speakers (which reminds me, I should complile a kernel with sound support some year) type on the keyboard, and get work done. If I wanted a comtpuer to look at I'd get an SGI which form and function go togather, not impeade one anouther.
Congress controlls the purse. Next session (january?) remind your congressmen to cut the budget of the NSA way back. Let the NSA do some firing of people they can't afford and it will not only put them in their place, but it will give us back some sense of privacy.
Just because the NSA doesn't appear on budgets normally doesn't mean congress can't do this, they just have to cut all agencies funding them
Agreed, to a point. Very few people talk 24x7. The unmetered pricing has to reflect this. However internet shouldn't be on the voice lines anyway (thats why we got xDSL - see the stories yesterday about this fake) and nobody talks 24x7. Telephone companies in the US are making money at the unmetered rate.
Note, none of this applies to celluar as they cannot easially add more lines. Once the channels are used up they are used up and only a new phone can take advantage of the new lines. For land based lines adding more wire is cheap (relativly, it does cost big dollars but not when spread out over the life of those wires)
Not true. If you use your phone 100% of the time, or never in a month the phone company still has wires out to your palce, a connection to their switch. They still print you a phone book. They still have to pay the technitions to keep your line running. Thus they still have to bill you even if you don't use it. The fixed costs for local calls (within the same siwthcing office) are higher then the other costs. Once you call between two switching offices they can share lines when you are not using it (this isn't a dedicated line form your house to grandmas in the next city, when you hang up someone else uses that line. More complex of course, but that is the gist)
Yes it does cost the phone company more for someone who is on the phone 100% of the time, but it isn't particularry significant if you are not calling long distnaces (geography wise).
Others have given probable wiring diagrams, so I won't attempt to repeat them. At work a few years back I did this, someplace we found a AUI-AUI null cable, and it worked fine. If there were any extra parts they all fit inside a cable hood. I didn't wire it, I just used it.
Most importantly it worked, so if you feel like putting it togather it can work.
ATX corrected several porblems of AT motherboards, but added the stupid soft power switch.
With the old AT cases it was possibal to mix up the power connectoers (they were 100% identical visually, other then label and wire color, if the manufature bothered to get those factors right) Mix up the connector and at least you need a new motherboard. There were also problmes of screw spacing never quit standardised.
ATX cases have a different power supply connector.
Yes, having a board that will accept either alpha or K-7 would be nice. Having a board that will accept BOTH at the same time would be nicer. I'd really like to get the speed of alpha for native processes, without losing the ability to run solitair in WINE. (what else does anyone do with their time anyway?) I'm sure there are more things that can be done too.
I hearby disclaim any acknologiment, monitary or otherwise from any person or other entinty using this idea.
Ok, hot shot. Try this, whats 2+2? Enter in 100 times, and I'll bet your get 5 (or something equally wrong) once. with RPN you have all numbers right in front of you. So you see: 2 Then hit +, and you see nothing.
On the hp it is like this: 2 2 Which I'm in the habbit of looking over before hitting that plus key.
Now I'm willing to grant that I still make mistakes, but I've been saved many times by looking for them.
You miss several important points, some for you, others against:
Math is not Arithmatic. Mathamatitions do not spend all day adding subtracting, multipling or dividing. They spend their time manipulating symbols, and only touch real numbers if they need to. Enginneers use the numbers, but they do all the hard math work first, and then the arithmatic.
I can do most simple addition in my head faster then I can enter it into any calculator, including my super fast hp48gx. When you consider keyboarding errors things need to get complex before the calculator is faster then me. And for doing the symbolic manipulation I'm faster than the calculator if it can even get the answer.
I found that I used few of the features of my hp48Gx, but I still consider it worth it for engineering, especcially the freshmen general physics that you should take. For the higher level classes I found the calculator at best slightly faster in only a few cases.
So in conclusion, you are right, learn to do the arithmatic in your head fast for the easy parts, but when the going gets tough (pi*e^-2/7-56*22.248 which is what you may get after substituting valuse for the variables) know you could do it by hand while you pull out the calculator.
Don't rely on the calculator for everything. I remember one girl who accuayy raised her hand to ask about one step in a long proff, and the answer was "2+2=4". Seriously, it wasn't that she was dumb, but rather she didn't think about 2ac+2ac = 4ac (guess what the derivation was, anyone with algrebra should know as this is the only part of high school algebra you are likley to need for all techenical classes throughout college)
Depends on which life you are wondering about. Rabbits breed like rabbits. If everyone going west had lived on bothing but rabbits (hunting every day), it is unlikely they could have caused problems with rabbit population. Shooting a 1000 lb bison (buffalo) and only being able to carry 100 lbs is realistic, though I would have gone back for the rest. In any case the Bison, antalope, and so on didn't fare so well, and their numbers have not yet recovered, but they are close.
Not all of us. Some of us geeks would just be red all year long. I cannot be in the sun for more then 15 minutes without some heavy duty sunscreen. Even in my pre comptuers days I couldn't (back before I could read), and things have not changed. I like being outdoors, the outdoors doesn't like me.
Yeah, I want to see a palm/cell phone intigrated. I like my cell phone even though I only use about 5 minutes in the typical month. I'd use email a lot more though. (I don't need full web access, though that would be nice)
I just want one gadget that I can take with me that has what I need on it.
The change log is on the disk. It is stored sequentially.
Basicly it is like this: You write to the changelog "I'm going to modify sector xxx to be yyy" Then you modify sector xxx, then you delete that part of the changelog. IF anything in the changelog is corrupt, it doesn't matter cuase you didn't write the change to the other sector. If something is in the changelog after a crash, then you go in quickly and re-write all those secotrs bringing them up to date. This saves time because you only check the sectors in the changelog, the rest must be safe because they are not in the changelog. And you can tell if the changelog is corrupt (it would only be one sector) and not modify the affected area. Therefore you always either have the new data, or a rollback to the old one.
I don't even need to know swedish to read that much. It was not clear if the other awardise were honary docorates or advisers to Linux (most live in the USA leading me to incorrectly guess the latter) I did realise that it didn't say much at all about Linus though.
Put effort into it, and you will be surprized how much of a foreign language you can read. Mind you it takes practice to understand it, but to read and catch the drift is something you can do. Well, not with chinese or russian because the symbols have no meaning, and the languages don't have the latin influence that this all goes by.
Accually, most countries have exterdition deals, which means if you discover someone commited a crime in one country, but is currently in a different one, the contry they are in will arrest them for you, and arrange for them to get into your court system.
I do now know if this can apply to email/the internet or now, but a good lawyer might be able to get a US citician in the US for violating a UK law under this deal.
PS, note all the mights, and the other signs that I don't know? I'm not a lawyer, I don't understand these laws, nor the ways they do/do no apply. It would be worth persuing by someone who did though.
Ick. In my job we are hot swapping some parts, and fail over on others. Hot swap is easier by far, at least if your hardware is designed right, and you are programing from scratch. Failover introduces too many headaches. (This might be our implimentation) With hot swap we get interupts when something is added, and we bring it up to day. With fail over we have to supply them ourselves, and deal with broken network connections. Once we get a connection in hardware it stays (at least to our 500,000 hour MTBF, of course their can be problems) With a network connection you need to handle someone tripping over the cable (comunication is down for a few mintues, and the back machine doesn't know if it needs to fail over or not.
Of course all problems with failover are solveable. I hate it though, I'd rather impliment a real hot-swap solution with hardware to support it then a failover solution with all the things needed to support it.
At the moment said companies want to hear that their (mis)investment n NT is safe, so that is what they will get
Did'nt you read closely? The very end made it clear that they don't hold NT up as any better. In fact NT is only mentioned once, in the paragraph where they say that NT really isn't better.
Is Linux enterprise-ready? (Yes, we can legitimately ask the same question of Windows NT. Many experienced corporate users say NT is not ready for prime time. The Standish Group agrees.)
Seems honest to me, linux is not ready for prime time, since it runs best on PCs, which are not designed for high relability, and low downtime. 3 minutes downtime won't take care of a reboot once a year on my machine (My bios takes nearly a minute beofre it even tries to load an OS) Add in that most reboots should be in response to hardware problems and you realise that linux isn't up to the task.
Try this: add a disk drive to a linux system, while the power is on, and you are running with full load. Can't be done easially, controllers that can do this are rare, getting linux to re-scan the hardware chain is a mess. (I think it is doable, but not nicely) Can SMP linux deal with the failure of a processor? How about hot swapping out that processor for anouther? Maybe we should add more processors next month too. What about more memory? Opps, one network controller broke. when you have as much hardware as a high end server has, even though you use the best, the failures happen all the time. You use RAID (support exists, but isn't well tested or robuse enough) and the ability to hot-swap anything. Now granted only a few systems support this hot swapability, a testiment to how difficult it is. (I should know, a major portion of my day job is makeing hot swap work) Linux may never have this, but mission critical requires it.
Where does this leave for linux? EVERYTHING! mission critical is important, but if 3 minutes of downtime (while you do the once a year reboot) will cost you 6 million (not an outragious figgure) Don't you think a company can afford to pay 3 million a year to get hardware and software to work. What about the rest. What is the cost of a small department server going down? Can't be much, as we all know that NT is selling many servers. Now offer to replace Nt with a cheaper system that crashes less? Not much of a savings, but it is there, and it saves headaches. Most importantly, this is the largest number of comptuers! Who cares if the computer on my secritaries desk reboots, she needs more coffee anyway. If the comptuer on my desk reboots (like it did today when I accidently pulled the plug) 4 people care (the ones on X terminals off my system). If the fileserver in the backroom reboots the entire company cares. The downtime is measurable. (10 minutes times 500 people is 2 weeks of downtime, or several thousand dollards.)
Don't forget that except for the Mainframe, most high end comptuers run unix. Linux looks like unix, so it is easy for admins to go between linux and Unix.
No, Linux is not ready for the enterprize, but don't be fooled, the enterprize doesn't consider NT ready either, and NT has the entire marketing muscle of M$ behind them. Of course NT is getting into the enterprize, but not in anything important.
The military uses red and black, not red and green. Same principal. (I had help designing a firewall for them once, and have a interface labled red, and the other black was in the requirements. I don't remember which is which off hand.
BTW, this isn't ment to imply that all networks are connected, there are networks that are unconnected. The semi-secure but internet connected network is firewalled by this box, not the most highest security level networks, which not physical connection is allowed.
Programming is more art then science. A million line program (I'm working on one now) is about the equivelent of engineering a bridge from Death Valley up to the sapce station It could be done, as any engineer would tell you, but no enginner would attempt it because it is so difficult. Yet NT is between 20-40 million lines (depending on how counts) Solaris is 6 million lines (If I recall correctly, at least 5 anyway) God only knows how big Office is. I could write a bug free 1000 line program in little time. It would take me 20 times as long (This is a very low estimate) to write a 10000 line program, but if you only asked that the 10000 line program rarely encounter a bug, I will have the 10000 line program done faster then the bug free 1000 line program
When you ask me to write a small bug free program I'll do it, it will cost you in time though. Forget internet years equaling a couple months, cuase there is no way to debug a program in that time.
When the publics attitude chages, when programing will change too.
BTW, whats the problem with music school drop outs programing? I happen to know a couple who are good programers.
I'm a bit rusty on this, but I seem to recall that if P=NP (which some belive true, but has never been proven) then ALL problems that cause public key encryption to work beomce vulnerable at the same time.
In other words we already know there is a simple way to go from factoring a big prime number to breaking ECC. Note that here simple means N time or something equally simple in comptuer terms. It does not mean we know what the simple procedure is, only that we already know there is some way to go from factoring primes to breaking ECC.
Or as my Professer in that ECC course I took a couple years ago liked to say "Until that unlikey day when someone proves a therom on chaos theory, this is unbreakable."
What if a Microsoft(ish) wins?
on
Bid for Geeks?
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· Score: 1
Yeah, we all want more money. But Microsoft could offer me 3.14 million a year and I wouldn't take it. (Maybe if I had a family and had stupidly placed myself in dept this would chance) I have no need to work for any company. If you want my 40 hours a week, you need to pay me, AND treat me right.
PS, anyone who is considering taking me up on a better offer has to beat my salery, plus donuts tommorow morning, and lunch friday. Add in lots of other great people to work with. (Although above my boss's boss management sucks, my boss is a good guy, and the engineers are fun)
The TVs love to interview someone crying. It looks so good. IF there are any good actors out there, who also have put a coheirant sentance togather (I'm neither) please do take the media attention. But if you cannot advance the geek cause, stay out of the spotlight.
Remember those ice skaters are few years back, one tried to take the other out (tynia Harding? and Nacny Carriagan?) the media people I know/trust tried to have sympathy for the one who was hit, but she eventially earned the title of dope because she chouldn't say anything useful to the media. If you can't carry on an intelligant coversation under pressure (I can't) plase stay away.
So if you can advance the geek cause, please change the world. The rest of us support you, and will try to stay out of the way.
Pardon me for being a cynic, but All I can think of is some goverment paying to "loose" this satalite and then aiming it where they want to, to take pictures where they want to of what they want to know.
Slashdot Mirror
Several good comments to read have been made.
At headquarters (not where I work) all the labs have a 2 inch my half copper bar running all the way around the lab. Battery cables (8 gauge or better (smaller)) is connected from that to every workstation. This assues a common ground and helps to avoid problems. As someone else mentioned, you can duplicate the same thing yourself)
Ground fault interupters (which in the US are required in bathrooms and kitchens. often called GFCI) do not protect look at the ground wire, if any current goes through the ground wire the GFCI should trip. I suspect that if you pluged the bad equipment into a GFCI it would trip.
Grounding is complex, electrical engineers can take senior level courses on grounds. Don't think that you will learn all you need to konw about them here.
Make sure all your grounds are tied togather, doing the best you can to be sure of the connection. Beware that wires can induce current into your ground (transformer work on this principal) just by running close to it.
If you leave the mains ground connected to your equipment, make sure your ground and the mains ground are tied togather. Don't trust a water pipe, use a real ground. Make sure if you try this that the connections on the mains ground is good everywhere.
If you have two different stakes in the ground, you can make a battery, which is short circuted when you connect the two togather. There are other problems, but in generally it isn't a bad thing to have two ground stakes.
I'm bitter about pickup trucks too. Trucks should be square, tough (as in drop a 1000 lbs rock in the back end and get out of there) and have real transmissions.
I can't beleive the people who fall for the sexy marketing. They are work vehicals, not toys. The Dogde gets more horsepower from the automatic transmission because they take away the torque from the low end. Pickups are about torque not horsepower, they use too much fuel as it willout bruning it away in too low a gear for the speed you are taking.
Which is why My comptuer is in a corner where I can't see it. I look at the monitor, listen to the speakers (which reminds me, I should complile a kernel with sound support some year) type on the keyboard, and get work done. If I wanted a comtpuer to look at I'd get an SGI which form and function go togather, not impeade one anouther.
Congress controlls the purse. Next session (january?) remind your congressmen to cut the budget of the NSA way back. Let the NSA do some firing of people they can't afford and it will not only put them in their place, but it will give us back some sense of privacy.
Just because the NSA doesn't appear on budgets normally doesn't mean congress can't do this, they just have to cut all agencies funding them
Agreed, to a point. Very few people talk 24x7. The unmetered pricing has to reflect this. However internet shouldn't be on the voice lines anyway (thats why we got xDSL - see the stories yesterday about this fake) and nobody talks 24x7. Telephone companies in the US are making money at the unmetered rate.
Note, none of this applies to celluar as they cannot easially add more lines. Once the channels are used up they are used up and only a new phone can take advantage of the new lines. For land based lines adding more wire is cheap (relativly, it does cost big dollars but not when spread out over the life of those wires)
Not true. If you use your phone 100% of the time, or never in a month the phone company still has wires out to your palce, a connection to their switch. They still print you a phone book. They still have to pay the technitions to keep your line running. Thus they still have to bill you even if you don't use it. The fixed costs for local calls (within the same siwthcing office) are higher then the other costs. Once you call between two switching offices they can share lines when you are not using it (this isn't a dedicated line form your house to grandmas in the next city, when you hang up someone else uses that line. More complex of course, but that is the gist)
Yes it does cost the phone company more for someone who is on the phone 100% of the time, but it isn't particularry significant if you are not calling long distnaces (geography wise).
Others have given probable wiring diagrams, so I won't attempt to repeat them. At work a few years back I did this, someplace we found a AUI-AUI null cable, and it worked fine. If there were any extra parts they all fit inside a cable hood. I didn't wire it, I just used it.
Most importantly it worked, so if you feel like putting it togather it can work.
ATX corrected several porblems of AT motherboards, but added the stupid soft power switch.
With the old AT cases it was possibal to mix up the power connectoers (they were 100% identical visually, other then label and wire color, if the manufature bothered to get those factors right) Mix up the connector and at least you need a new motherboard. There were also problmes of screw spacing never quit standardised.
ATX cases have a different power supply connector.
Yes, having a board that will accept either alpha or K-7 would be nice. Having a board that will accept BOTH at the same time would be nicer. I'd really like to get the speed of alpha for native processes, without losing the ability to run solitair in WINE. (what else does anyone do with their time anyway?) I'm sure there are more things that can be done too.
I hearby disclaim any acknologiment, monitary or otherwise from any person or other entinty using this idea.
Ok, hot shot. Try this, whats 2+2? Enter in 100 times, and I'll bet your get 5 (or something equally wrong) once. with RPN you have all numbers right in front of you. So you see:
2 Then hit +, and you see nothing.
On the hp it is like this:
2
2
Which I'm in the habbit of looking over before hitting that plus key.
Now I'm willing to grant that I still make mistakes, but I've been saved many times by looking for them.
You miss several important points, some for you, others against:
Math is not Arithmatic. Mathamatitions do not spend all day adding subtracting, multipling or dividing. They spend their time manipulating symbols, and only touch real numbers if they need to. Enginneers use the numbers, but they do all the hard math work first, and then the arithmatic.
I can do most simple addition in my head faster then I can enter it into any calculator, including my super fast hp48gx. When you consider keyboarding errors things need to get complex before the calculator is faster then me. And for doing the symbolic manipulation I'm faster than the calculator if it can even get the answer.
I found that I used few of the features of my hp48Gx, but I still consider it worth it for engineering, especcially the freshmen general physics that you should take. For the higher level classes I found the calculator at best slightly faster in only a few cases.
So in conclusion, you are right, learn to do the arithmatic in your head fast for the easy parts, but when the going gets tough (pi*e^-2/7-56*22.248 which is what you may get after substituting valuse for the variables) know you could do it by hand while you pull out the calculator.
Don't rely on the calculator for everything. I remember one girl who accuayy raised her hand to ask about one step in a long proff, and the answer was "2+2=4". Seriously, it wasn't that she was dumb, but rather she didn't think about 2ac+2ac = 4ac (guess what the derivation was, anyone with algrebra should know as this is the only part of high school algebra you are likley to need for all techenical classes throughout college)
Depends on which life you are wondering about. Rabbits breed like rabbits. If everyone going west had lived on bothing but rabbits (hunting every day), it is unlikely they could have caused problems with rabbit population. Shooting a 1000 lb bison (buffalo) and only being able to carry 100 lbs is realistic, though I would have gone back for the rest. In any case the Bison, antalope, and so on didn't fare so well, and their numbers have not yet recovered, but they are close.
Not all of us. Some of us geeks would just be red all year long. I cannot be in the sun for more then 15 minutes without some heavy duty sunscreen. Even in my pre comptuers days I couldn't (back before I could read), and things have not changed. I like being outdoors, the outdoors doesn't like me.
Yeah, I want to see a palm/cell phone intigrated. I like my cell phone even though I only use about 5 minutes in the typical month. I'd use email a lot more though. (I don't need full web access, though that would be nice)
I just want one gadget that I can take with me that has what I need on it.
The change log is on the disk. It is stored sequentially.
Basicly it is like this: You write to the changelog "I'm going to modify sector xxx to be yyy" Then you modify sector xxx, then you delete that part of the changelog. IF anything in the changelog is corrupt, it doesn't matter cuase you didn't write the change to the other sector. If something is in the changelog after a crash, then you go in quickly and re-write all those secotrs bringing them up to date. This saves time because you only check the sectors in the changelog, the rest must be safe because they are not in the changelog. And you can tell if the changelog is corrupt (it would only be one sector) and not modify the affected area. Therefore you always either have the new data, or a rollback to the old one.
I don't even need to know swedish to read that much. It was not clear if the other awardise were honary docorates or advisers to Linux (most live in the USA leading me to incorrectly guess the latter) I did realise that it didn't say much at all about Linus though.
Put effort into it, and you will be surprized how much of a foreign language you can read. Mind you it takes practice to understand it, but to read and catch the drift is something you can do. Well, not with chinese or russian because the symbols have no meaning, and the languages don't have the latin influence that this all goes by.
Accually, most countries have exterdition deals, which means if you discover someone commited a crime in one country, but is currently in a different one, the contry they are in will arrest them for you, and arrange for them to get into your court system.
I do now know if this can apply to email/the internet or now, but a good lawyer might be able to get a US citician in the US for violating a UK law under this deal.
PS, note all the mights, and the other signs that I don't know? I'm not a lawyer, I don't understand these laws, nor the ways they do/do no apply. It would be worth persuing by someone who did though.
Ick. In my job we are hot swapping some parts, and fail over on others. Hot swap is easier by far, at least if your hardware is designed right, and you are programing from scratch. Failover introduces too many headaches. (This might be our implimentation) With hot swap we get interupts when something is added, and we bring it up to day. With fail over we have to supply them ourselves, and deal with broken network connections. Once we get a connection in hardware it stays (at least to our 500,000 hour MTBF, of course their can be problems) With a network connection you need to handle someone tripping over the cable (comunication is down for a few mintues, and the back machine doesn't know if it needs to fail over or not.
Of course all problems with failover are solveable. I hate it though, I'd rather impliment a real hot-swap solution with hardware to support it then a failover solution with all the things needed to support it.
At the moment said companies want to hear that their (mis)investment n NT is safe, so that is what they will get
Did'nt you read closely? The very end made it clear that they don't hold NT up as any better. In fact NT is only mentioned once, in the paragraph where they say that NT really isn't better.
Seems honest to me, linux is not ready for prime time, since it runs best on PCs, which are not designed for high relability, and low downtime. 3 minutes downtime won't take care of a reboot once a year on my machine (My bios takes nearly a minute beofre it even tries to load an OS) Add in that most reboots should be in response to hardware problems and you realise that linux isn't up to the task.
Try this: add a disk drive to a linux system, while the power is on, and you are running with full load. Can't be done easially, controllers that can do this are rare, getting linux to re-scan the hardware chain is a mess. (I think it is doable, but not nicely) Can SMP linux deal with the failure of a processor? How about hot swapping out that processor for anouther? Maybe we should add more processors next month too. What about more memory? Opps, one network controller broke. when you have as much hardware as a high end server has, even though you use the best, the failures happen all the time. You use RAID (support exists, but isn't well tested or robuse enough) and the ability to hot-swap anything. Now granted only a few systems support this hot swapability, a testiment to how difficult it is. (I should know, a major portion of my day job is makeing hot swap work) Linux may never have this, but mission critical requires it.
Where does this leave for linux? EVERYTHING! mission critical is important, but if 3 minutes of downtime (while you do the once a year reboot) will cost you 6 million (not an outragious figgure) Don't you think a company can afford to pay 3 million a year to get hardware and software to work. What about the rest. What is the cost of a small department server going down? Can't be much, as we all know that NT is selling many servers. Now offer to replace Nt with a cheaper system that crashes less? Not much of a savings, but it is there, and it saves headaches. Most importantly, this is the largest number of comptuers! Who cares if the computer on my secritaries desk reboots, she needs more coffee anyway. If the comptuer on my desk reboots (like it did today when I accidently pulled the plug) 4 people care (the ones on X terminals off my system). If the fileserver in the backroom reboots the entire company cares. The downtime is measurable. (10 minutes times 500 people is 2 weeks of downtime, or several thousand dollards.)
Don't forget that except for the Mainframe, most high end comptuers run unix. Linux looks like unix, so it is easy for admins to go between linux and Unix.
No, Linux is not ready for the enterprize, but don't be fooled, the enterprize doesn't consider NT ready either, and NT has the entire marketing muscle of M$ behind them. Of course NT is getting into the enterprize, but not in anything important.
The military uses red and black, not red and green. Same principal. (I had help designing a firewall for them once, and have a interface labled red, and the other black was in the requirements. I don't remember which is which off hand.
BTW, this isn't ment to imply that all networks are connected, there are networks that are unconnected. The semi-secure but internet connected network is firewalled by this box, not the most highest security level networks, which not physical connection is allowed.
Programming is more art then science. A million line program (I'm working on one now) is about the equivelent of engineering a bridge from Death Valley up to the sapce station It could be done, as any engineer would tell you, but no enginner would attempt it because it is so difficult. Yet NT is between 20-40 million lines (depending on how counts) Solaris is 6 million lines (If I recall correctly, at least 5 anyway) God only knows how big Office is. I could write a bug free 1000 line program in little time. It would take me 20 times as long (This is a very low estimate) to write a 10000 line program, but if you only asked that the 10000 line program rarely encounter a bug, I will have the 10000 line program done faster then the bug free 1000 line program
When you ask me to write a small bug free program I'll do it, it will cost you in time though. Forget internet years equaling a couple months, cuase there is no way to debug a program in that time.
When the publics attitude chages, when programing will change too.
BTW, whats the problem with music school drop outs programing? I happen to know a couple who are good programers.
I'm a bit rusty on this, but I seem to recall that if P=NP (which some belive true, but has never been proven) then ALL problems that cause public key encryption to work beomce vulnerable at the same time.
In other words we already know there is a simple way to go from factoring a big prime number to breaking ECC. Note that here simple means N time or something equally simple in comptuer terms. It does not mean we know what the simple procedure is, only that we already know there is some way to go from factoring primes to breaking ECC.
Or as my Professer in that ECC course I took a couple years ago liked to say "Until that unlikey day when someone proves a therom on chaos theory, this is unbreakable."
Yeah, we all want more money. But Microsoft could offer me 3.14 million a year and I wouldn't take it. (Maybe if I had a family and had stupidly placed myself in dept this would chance) I have no need to work for any company. If you want my 40 hours a week, you need to pay me, AND treat me right.
PS, anyone who is considering taking me up on a better offer has to beat my salery, plus donuts tommorow morning, and lunch friday. Add in lots of other great people to work with. (Although above my boss's boss management sucks, my boss is a good guy, and the engineers are fun)
The TVs love to interview someone crying. It looks so good. IF there are any good actors out there, who also have put a coheirant sentance togather (I'm neither) please do take the media attention. But if you cannot advance the geek cause, stay out of the spotlight.
Remember those ice skaters are few years back, one tried to take the other out (tynia Harding? and Nacny Carriagan?) the media people I know/trust tried to have sympathy for the one who was hit, but she eventially earned the title of dope because she chouldn't say anything useful to the media. If you can't carry on an intelligant coversation under pressure (I can't) plase stay away.
So if you can advance the geek cause, please change the world. The rest of us support you, and will try to stay out of the way.
Pardon me for being a cynic, but All I can think of is some goverment paying to "loose" this satalite and then aiming it where they want to, to take pictures where they want to of what they want to know.