The military and the DEA have been using smaller blimps, albeit teathered drones, for drug enforcement along the US/Mexico border in Southern California since at least 1990. Gives them a better look at all of the civilian air and ground traffic on the Mexico side of the border or something.
Ummm, no. They wanted a recount in counties that were suspect in their profiles (ie: where Buchanan got heaps of votes, stacks of invalid ballots, voters refused access to polls)
What stopped the recounts was
- The republicans physically interrupting the recount process constantly - Katherine Harris delaying the recount and setting impossible deadlines for hand counts to be turned in. - SC refusing to count 45000 discarded votes - Lawyers running out the clock with lawsuits. - The SC halting the recount and appointing Bush.
Why do people have a selective memory about the 2000 elections?
If this is bad code, then fine, it's bad code, but why FORCE people to use voting machines with bad code that provide NO PAPER TRAIL? With the horrible trials thus far with Diebold, why not do a lot more testing and trials of the software and the method before forcing anyone to use them?
Why is that finger pointing? Why not provide a FAIR method of elections that isn't controlled by a black box?
It's not just that the Diebold CEO was a donor to Bush, it's that he has been a top fund-raiser for Bush. Bush has thousands of donors, but few top fund-raisers. There are no top fund raisers for any campaign that do it out of the goodness of their hearts. It's all about agenda.
As for proof, how are you going to prove the "potential" to steal an election. Hell, they stole the 2000 election without Diebolds help. Now we're looking at voting with no paper trail for recounts. The "potential" only increases.
I don't know about everyone else, but I'd feel even worse about explaining my job to friends when fielding the question: "so, whaddya do?" if I had to refer to myself as some type of "practicioner" or "generalist". Yeah, I'd hand plenty of business cards out with either of those words on them.
I don't particularly see what's broken with "system administrator". It dumbs down nicely to "computer person" or PHBs up to "IT (IS) staff" if need be.
Of course if we all call ourselves "generalist practicioners" maybe people will think that we're doctors. No longer will women tune out 30 seconds after meeting us and learning that we work with computers!
Perhaps at large companies you need this kind of overly structured classification of people / job titles for the 20 layers of management to chew on, but maybe the term "system administrator" is just fine and the managers are the ones that need to actually pay attention and learn who we are, what we do, and how we knew what naughty websites they've been surfing.
SAGE would then have to become CIPGE or CIGGE, both of which suck ass.
When I worked at NASA Ames Research Center in 1996, we had a few Cray supercomputers with 16 CPUs each (a big deal back then), plus various other multi-CPU systems and clusters (AIX and SGI based. Bleech!) and we had hundreds of customers from all over the country that all used the system remotely for simulations. We kept detailed records of their CPU usage for billing purposes.
Is IBM going to figure out some way to re-invent this?
Maybe we're 'tards here at work but I still have 3 floppy disks that I use.
2 of them are install disks for Mandrake 8.1 and 8.2 that I use for NFS installations. For some reason I can't just tell the BIOS to install over the network via NFS. No space in my bios for DNS server information or IP addresses. haha.
The other one is memtest.x86 which you plunk in and boot right into a memory tester.
Other than that I also have a Mac floppy disk that I keep in my Macintosh 512K (Yes, Kilobytes) computer. No keyboard, no mouse, just a floppy that boots and after 1 minute times out to an AfterDark screensaver with a clock on it. Both the cheapest and coolest clock I've ever bought. It was $2 at a swap meet.
This was definitely one of my favorite C64 games ever. Make the huge tracks with monsterous jumps and gravity slightly better than earth, then race in some sort of solid truck-class vehicle with the the computer on a motorcycle racing in the opposite direction and try to run the cycle over or knock it out of the air on a jump. I spent many hours on that awesome game. Amazing game for how little space it took up. I think it fit on two 5.25" floppies. You couldn't even fit the first Street Fighter game on two floppies these days.
I believe the word you're looking for is "Kludge". This definitely applies. Replace all the words you want but it's the wrong path to take. It's like filtering all of your EMail for certain words and then just adding onto the list of words/phrases you look for. Doing this without running something that either checks for valid domains or looks at a blacklist is not a good solution. Let's hope Yahoo! does more than just replace "Mocha" with "latte" or "Cafe Au Lait". I wonder if they can somehow translate to h4x0r language maybe using Google.
Um, the reporter's grasp of the situation is kinda tenuous. Apparently they are talking about the properties of air, and of undoped silicon, as a DIELECTRIC (i.e. an insulator). Air is indeed "faster" than silicon since air has a lower dielectric constant. However, this is not the dominant problem in high speed chip design -- not by a long shot. The fact that this research weenie is even talking about it, means that his own depth of understanding is puny indeed.
Here's a little secret: as good as air is, pure vacuum is even better. Why don't we make chips out of a pure vacuum? THAT'D be really neato and you don't even need chickens.
Get the career while you're going to college. I was lucky and got some really good training in the military on Unix systems. Then while I was still in the military got a job at a NASA site as a Jr. Sysadmin. I took quite a few college classes while I was in the military but never came close to a degree. I mainly took technical classes, programming and networking mostly. I think that having a degree will help you get interviews, but as far as what you're learning in college, you're lucky if it really helps much toward practical SysAdmin skills. I haven't seen many Sysadmin classes that were worth a damn at college. They're really junior for the most part. Vendor training is closer to the mark, but always very specific to their product. Where else are you going to learn about volume management and setting up a backup server though? One good avenue is to go to college and then get a paid internship at a company or your local NASA research center (if you have one) and learn the real skills at the internship while you're learning the theoretical stuff at college. Even if you don't get a degree, it's always helpful to take at least the minimum college computer classes: (Assuming Unix SysAdmin)
TCP/IP Bourne Shell programming Perl (lots of Perl if you can find it) Basic Networking Unix
Taking a few classes in a programming language would probably help, and make you more versatile to an employer. Mostly I just took programming classes for fun. Compiler and Internals classes probably won't be as useful as they seem on paper.
Certifications are great resume fodder, but that's about it. Get the CCNA, and a Solaris or Linux cert if you want to pad your resume. Also join USENIX/SAGE for resume buzzwords if nothing else.
In the end, the one thing that helped me most was working with a really good senior Sysadmin when I was a junior. He'd teach me anything I wanted to know and was really patient with me. I learned more in a month working with him than in any class I ever attended in college.
Once when I worked for Philips we got a deal on some Sun Ultra 60 servers that included us giving up some older HP workstations as part of the deal. One of those "give us the competitors system and we'll cut you a deal on our system" things to get you to switch to Sun hardware. Anyway, I had to ship a single HP workstation back to Sun. I called the Sun rep and he said he'd send out someone to pick it up. Later that day the guy shows up and tells me that his truck is in the back parking lot. I walk out there and bring the system (which was a 5 year old HP workstation about the same size as in old PC flat desktop case) and a monitor. The guy had brought a full size Semi tractor-tailer rig. He opened up the back and it was completely empty. I had this HUGE empty wherehouse on wheels for one system. He was a little pissed and thought he'd be picking up something big. Total waste of space and time for him to come out. I gave him the workstation and he signed for it. I watched him put the system and monitor up into the truck. He just set them right at the edge of the trailer and didn't secure them at all. I'm sure the workstation was fine because it was fairly flat. It might have slid a bit depending on it's LRF support. The Monitor was a 19" monitor and shaped like a cube with slanted sides around the CRT. I know that it must have spent the entire trip rolling around in the back of that truck. I felt bad, but what could I do. Sun actually wanted this POS system as part of the deal. Bummer. I would have loved to see them open up the truck later and use a broom to sweep the remains of that monitor into a trash can.
It was worth 1 karma point, nothing more. Thanks for playing. Funny that I can get printing working just fine with one freaking command in Solaris 7 & 8 but I have to use CRAPS, er... CUPS under Linux. Way to go Penguin coders. You've build another not-quite-finished software product for the masses.
Running Mandrake 8.0 & 8.1 at work with 2 large HP printers, I notice that stair-stepping is back. Postscript printing works fine for the most part but I get quasi-random stair stepping of plain old text docs. It's random enough that the last time I was trying to track it down, I printed the same document 4 times and the middle 2 were stair stepped and the other 2 weren't.
It's lame and I hate telling the users "just print it again and it should be okay" but never knowing what the problem is.
I remember solving this problem back in 1995 by writing a small shell script to act as a print filter and translate the LFs to CR/LFs or some such nonsense. Now that I'm printing primarily Postscript, I don't think adding a print filter (to everyone's computer) would work out very well.
I'm also constantly annoyed at CUPS probing port 631 on my entire network because it tries to be it's own print server for every printer on the network, so it'll have 6 lines in the output of "lpstat -t" for the same printer, but using 5 other computers as print servers plus itself.
Is there any decent documentation on CUPS outside of just how to install it and run the GUIs? I'm not impressed.
I got lucky and was in the right place at the right time in the military. The Sysadmins at the military base were all Gov't civilians, but they needed someone at the time I got there, so they gave me a trial offer. I had never used Unix, never programmed in anything stronger than BASIC or Fortran, but for some reason they let me take a stab at it. I loved it from the start, and knew it was my station in life.
After the military I worked at NASA Ames Research Center in Silly-con valley and I saw that two of the local Jr. Colleges had internship deals with NASA in our building alone. The college kids interviewed for internships and worked at Ames for $8/hr. Crap pay, but they got the opportunity to work with insane systems. (3 Crays, 2 giant clusters, an SGI O2000 w/ 128 nodes, etc...) Everything was on a HUGE scale there. I can't think of a better place to intern. Some of them were hired on as full time admins, some just used the experience to get admin jobs.
Read the O'Reilly books, take some Sys Admin classes, network your computers together at home. Set up DNS servers, NIS servers, backup servers, CVS, IMAP, Sendmail, NFS, and learn how to program with the bourne shell. Not so much so that you can get a job doing it, but so that you can troubleshoot other shell scripts when they're not behaving. All of the startup scripts are poorly written shell scripts, especially for Linux. The more you learn about how they're supposed to work, the quicker you can spot the problem that's keeping that big server from booting properly.
Learn the boot process of a system as well. That'll come in handy once a week at least.
What about the Protein folding screensaver / CPU cycle user folding@home. Some Stanford geeks want your help to fold protein strings. Works for me. SETI is lame and overrated. I might as well start watching X-Files again...
someone at SGI developed this 5 years ago
on
The ASCII Cam
·
· Score: 5
Linux is only 5 years behind... I used something when I worked at SGI with my Indycam to display the output of the camera in an xterm in ASCII.
I found this webpage (circa 1995) detailing the software. Congrats Linux you've revolutionalized the computer industry again. I hope you at least stole *some* of the code before creating this new and wonderful tool...
Million? Try Billion. 4.74 billion dollars according to the article on SFgate. It's ludicrious that they get this kind of corporate welfare. Ralph Nader doesn't sound so bad now does he?
I was working at NASA Ames Research Center a few years ago as a Unix Sys Admin and I remember that there were probably 5 or 6 interns working in our area. Two of the local community colleges had deals with the center where interns would get to work at Ames, get college credit, and get low wages (like $7/hr at the time. Might be more now). Looking quickly on the web, I see that the program has a webpage at: http://interns.arc.nasa.gov
The main NASA webpage has a section for student jobs, but it's buried under some huge URL.
It might not suit you because of the location (Silicon Valley) but if there's a NASA location near you, chances are that they would have a similar program. It's not great pay, but what company are you going to go to where you get to work with HUGE supercomputers:
Crays, IBM SP-2, SGI O2000, and hundreds of terabytes of online tape robot storage.
(that list was much more impressive in 1996, I swear!)
It's definitely an interesting place to work for your $7/hr. (1996 wages) They'd end up hiring most of the interns that were interested.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen Matt Janulewicz put cashews in his nose. He's a Legumist.
So did Matrix Semiconductor
"Venture To The Land Of The Freeze Dried Godzilla Farts"
orsomethingtothateffect.
The military and the DEA have been using smaller blimps, albeit teathered drones, for drug enforcement along the US/Mexico border in Southern California since at least 1990. Gives them a better look at all of the civilian air and ground traffic on the Mexico side of the border or something.
OR SO THE GERMANS WOULD HAVE YOU BELIEVE!!!
or Monobrow?
Like nerds ever groom their facial hair other than shaving around that tired goatee.
Ummm, no. They wanted a recount in counties that were suspect in their profiles (ie: where Buchanan got heaps of votes, stacks of invalid ballots, voters refused access to polls)
What stopped the recounts was
- The republicans physically interrupting the recount process constantly
- Katherine Harris delaying the recount and setting impossible deadlines for hand counts to be turned in.
- SC refusing to count 45000 discarded votes
- Lawyers running out the clock with lawsuits.
- The SC halting the recount and appointing Bush.
Why do people have a selective memory about the 2000 elections?
If this is bad code, then fine, it's bad code, but why FORCE people to use voting machines with bad code that provide NO PAPER TRAIL? With the horrible trials thus far with Diebold, why not do a lot more testing and trials of the software and the method before forcing anyone to use them?
Why is that finger pointing? Why not provide a FAIR method of elections that isn't controlled by a black box?
It's not just that the Diebold CEO was a donor to Bush, it's that he has been a top fund-raiser for Bush. Bush has thousands of donors, but few top fund-raisers. There are no top fund raisers for any campaign that do it out of the goodness of their hearts. It's all about agenda.
As for proof, how are you going to prove the "potential" to steal an election. Hell, they stole the 2000 election without Diebolds help. Now we're looking at voting with no paper trail for recounts. The "potential" only increases.
Pry your brain away from the right.
Special guess celebrity: Randy Macho Man Savage:
Kid: "Pentium chips aren't an extreme sport, Macho Man..."
MM: "PENTIUM CHIPS NOT EXTREEEEEMMMMEEE!?!?! OOHHHH YEEAAAAH!!!!"
I don't know about everyone else, but I'd feel even worse about explaining my job to friends when fielding the question: "so, whaddya do?" if I had to refer to myself as some type of "practicioner" or "generalist". Yeah, I'd hand plenty of business cards out with either of those words on them.
I don't particularly see what's broken with "system administrator". It dumbs down nicely to "computer person" or PHBs up to "IT (IS) staff" if need be.
Of course if we all call ourselves "generalist practicioners" maybe people will think that we're doctors. No longer will women tune out 30 seconds after meeting us and learning that we work with computers!
Perhaps at large companies you need this kind of overly structured classification of people / job titles for the 20 layers of management to chew on, but maybe the term "system administrator" is just fine and the managers are the ones that need to actually pay attention and learn who we are, what we do, and how we knew what naughty websites they've been surfing.
SAGE would then have to become CIPGE or CIGGE, both of which suck ass.
-nrmrvrk
About time that someone posted a decent April Fools joke.
Now i just hope that the part about Mithrandir giving the elves AR-15s and Sauraman choking on a pretzel are true...
-nrmrvrk
When I worked at NASA Ames Research Center in 1996, we had a few Cray supercomputers with 16 CPUs each (a big deal back then), plus various other multi-CPU systems and clusters (AIX and SGI based. Bleech!) and we had hundreds of customers from all over the country that all used the system remotely for simulations. We kept detailed records of their CPU usage for billing purposes.
Is IBM going to figure out some way to re-invent this?
Stories of the past....
Maybe we're 'tards here at work but I still have 3 floppy disks that I use.
2 of them are install disks for Mandrake 8.1 and 8.2 that I use for NFS installations. For some reason I can't just tell the BIOS to install over the network via NFS. No space in my bios for DNS server information or IP addresses. haha.
The other one is memtest.x86 which you plunk in and boot right into a memory tester.
Other than that I also have a Mac floppy disk that I keep in my Macintosh 512K (Yes, Kilobytes) computer. No keyboard, no mouse, just a floppy that boots and after 1 minute times out to an AfterDark screensaver with a clock on it. Both the cheapest and coolest clock I've ever bought. It was $2 at a swap meet.
This was definitely one of my favorite C64 games ever. Make the huge tracks with monsterous jumps and gravity slightly better than earth, then race in some sort of solid truck-class vehicle with the the computer on a motorcycle racing in the opposite direction and try to run the cycle over or knock it out of the air on a jump. I spent many hours on that awesome game. Amazing game for how little space it took up. I think it fit on two 5.25" floppies. You couldn't even fit the first Street Fighter game on two floppies these days.
I believe the word you're looking for is "Kludge". This definitely applies. Replace all the words you want but it's the wrong path to take. It's like filtering all of your EMail for certain words and then just adding onto the list of words/phrases you look for. Doing this without running something that either checks for valid domains or looks at a blacklist is not a good solution. Let's hope Yahoo! does more than just replace "Mocha" with "latte" or "Cafe Au Lait". I wonder if they can somehow translate to h4x0r language maybe using Google.
Don't forget to change:
Mocha
M0ch4
^^0[h4
etc...
absurd
Um, the reporter's grasp of the situation is kinda tenuous. Apparently they are talking about the properties of air, and of undoped silicon, as a DIELECTRIC (i.e. an insulator). Air is indeed "faster" than silicon since air has a lower dielectric constant. However, this is not the dominant problem in high speed chip design -- not by a long shot. The fact that this research weenie is even talking about it, means that his own depth of understanding is puny indeed.
Here's a little secret: as good as air is, pure vacuum is even better. Why don't we make chips out of a pure vacuum? THAT'D be really neato and you don't even need chickens.
Get the career while you're going to college. I was lucky and got some really good training in the military on Unix systems. Then while I was still in the military got a job at a NASA site as a Jr. Sysadmin. I took quite a few college classes while I was in the military but never came close to a degree. I mainly took technical classes, programming and networking mostly. I think that having a degree will help you get interviews, but as far as what you're learning in college, you're lucky if it really helps much toward practical SysAdmin skills. I haven't seen many Sysadmin classes that were worth a damn at college. They're really junior for the most part. Vendor training is closer to the mark, but always very specific to their product. Where else are you going to learn about volume management and setting up a backup server though?
One good avenue is to go to college and then get a paid internship at a company or your local NASA research center (if you have one) and learn the real skills at the internship while you're learning the theoretical stuff at college. Even if you don't get a degree, it's always helpful to take at least the minimum college computer classes: (Assuming Unix SysAdmin)
TCP/IP
Bourne Shell programming
Perl (lots of Perl if you can find it)
Basic Networking
Unix
Taking a few classes in a programming language would probably help, and make you more versatile to an employer. Mostly I just took programming classes for fun. Compiler and Internals classes probably won't be as useful as they seem on paper.
Certifications are great resume fodder, but that's about it. Get the CCNA, and a Solaris or Linux cert if you want to pad your resume. Also join USENIX/SAGE for resume buzzwords if nothing else.
In the end, the one thing that helped me most was working with a really good senior Sysadmin when I was a junior. He'd teach me anything I wanted to know and was really patient with me. I learned more in a month working with him than in any class I ever attended in college.
Best of luck breaking into the field.
Once when I worked for Philips we got a deal on some Sun Ultra 60 servers that included us giving up some older HP workstations as part of the deal. One of those "give us the competitors system and we'll cut you a deal on our system" things to get you to switch to Sun hardware. Anyway, I had to ship a single HP workstation back to Sun. I called the Sun rep and he said he'd send out someone to pick it up. Later that day the guy shows up and tells me that his truck is in the back parking lot. I walk out there and bring the system (which was a 5 year old HP workstation about the same size as in old PC flat desktop case) and a monitor. The guy had brought a full size Semi tractor-tailer rig. He opened up the back and it was completely empty. I had this HUGE empty wherehouse on wheels for one system. He was a little pissed and thought he'd be picking up something big. Total waste of space and time for him to come out. I gave him the workstation and he signed for it.
I watched him put the system and monitor up into the truck. He just set them right at the edge of the trailer and didn't secure them at all. I'm sure the workstation was fine because it was fairly flat. It might have slid a bit depending on it's LRF support.
The Monitor was a 19" monitor and shaped like a cube with slanted sides around the CRT. I know that it must have spent the entire trip rolling around in the back of that truck. I felt bad, but what could I do. Sun actually wanted this POS system as part of the deal. Bummer. I would have loved to see them open up the truck later and use a broom to sweep the remains of that monitor into a trash can.
It was worth 1 karma point, nothing more. Thanks for playing. Funny that I can get printing working just fine with one freaking command in Solaris 7 & 8 but I have to use CRAPS, er... CUPS under Linux. Way to go Penguin coders. You've build another not-quite-finished software product for the masses.
Running Mandrake 8.0 & 8.1 at work with 2 large HP printers, I notice that stair-stepping is back. Postscript printing works fine for the most part but I get quasi-random stair stepping of plain old text docs. It's random enough that the last time I was trying to track it down, I printed the same document 4 times and the middle 2 were stair stepped and the other 2 weren't.
It's lame and I hate telling the users "just print it again and it should be okay" but never knowing what the problem is.
I remember solving this problem back in 1995 by writing a small shell script to act as a print filter and translate the LFs to CR/LFs or some such nonsense. Now that I'm printing primarily Postscript, I don't think adding a print filter (to everyone's computer) would work out very well.
I'm also constantly annoyed at CUPS probing port 631 on my entire network because it tries to be it's own print server for every printer on the network, so it'll have 6 lines in the output of "lpstat -t" for the same printer, but using 5 other computers as print servers plus itself.
Is there any decent documentation on CUPS outside of just how to install it and run the GUIs? I'm not impressed.
Flame away if you have solutions...
*nrmrvrk
I got lucky and was in the right place at the right time in the military. The Sysadmins at the military base were all Gov't civilians, but they needed someone at the time I got there, so they gave me a trial offer. I had never used Unix, never programmed in anything stronger than BASIC or Fortran, but for some reason they let me take a stab at it. I loved it from the start, and knew it was my station in life.
After the military I worked at NASA Ames Research Center in Silly-con valley and I saw that two of the local Jr. Colleges had internship deals with NASA in our building alone. The college kids interviewed for internships and worked at Ames for $8/hr. Crap pay, but they got the opportunity to work with insane systems. (3 Crays, 2 giant clusters, an SGI O2000 w/ 128 nodes, etc...) Everything was on a HUGE scale there. I can't think of a better place to intern. Some of them were hired on as full time admins, some just used the experience to get admin jobs.
Read the O'Reilly books, take some Sys Admin classes, network your computers together at home. Set up DNS servers, NIS servers, backup servers, CVS, IMAP, Sendmail, NFS, and learn how to program with the bourne shell. Not so much so that you can get a job doing it, but so that you can troubleshoot other shell scripts when they're not behaving. All of the startup scripts are poorly written shell scripts, especially for Linux. The more you learn about how they're supposed to work, the quicker you can spot the problem that's keeping that big server from booting properly.
Learn the boot process of a system as well. That'll come in handy once a week at least.
best of luck.
What about the Protein folding screensaver / CPU cycle user folding@home. Some Stanford geeks want your help to fold protein strings. Works for me. SETI is lame and overrated. I might as well start watching X-Files again...
Linux is only 5 years behind... I used something when I worked at SGI with my Indycam to display the output of the camera in an xterm in ASCII.
I found this webpage (circa 1995) detailing the software. Congrats Linux you've revolutionalized the computer industry again. I hope you at least stole *some* of the code before creating this new and wonderful tool...
http://reality.sgi.com/cpirazzi/ttyvideo.html
no egg!
Million? Try Billion. 4.74 billion dollars according to the article on SFgate. It's ludicrious that they get this kind of corporate welfare. Ralph Nader doesn't sound so bad now does he?
www.michaelmoore.com
I was working at NASA Ames Research Center a few years ago as a Unix Sys Admin and I remember that there were probably 5 or 6 interns working in our area. Two of the local community colleges had deals with the center where interns would get to work at Ames, get college credit, and get low wages (like $7/hr at the time. Might be more now). Looking quickly on the web, I see that the program has a webpage at: http://interns.arc.nasa.gov
The main NASA webpage has a section for student jobs, but it's buried under some huge URL.
It might not suit you because of the location (Silicon Valley) but if there's a NASA location near you, chances are that they would have a similar program. It's not great pay, but what company are you going to go to where you get to work with HUGE supercomputers:
Crays, IBM SP-2, SGI O2000, and hundreds of terabytes of online tape robot storage.
(that list was much more impressive in 1996, I swear!)
It's definitely an interesting place to work for your $7/hr. (1996 wages) They'd end up hiring most of the interns that were interested.