unixman

I found a 404 the other day that isn't a 404. I guess it's as good a way as any as the owner saying he is no longer selling his product. http://www.dcscripts.com/

I've aways said that only an idiot would use IE and I've been proven correct! It's official: IE users are dumb as a bag of hammers ? The Register I've been an Opera user for over 10 years, since version 3.5!

Philips QT4075 - sucks the whiskers away.

Ah the Selectric! I really wanted one of those when I was at uni in the late 1970s but I couldn't afford one. It would have made typing my thesis much easier. I purchased a Royal KMM of 1939 vintage, which I still have and it still works perfectly. What a shame I don't use it very often. I wonder how many thousands of pages it had typed over the years? I have an Adler Tippa too. Both the Royal and Adler are manual typewriters and hard work if you use them all day. They used to breed secretaries tough in the manual era! It's all far too easy these days; type your letter into any word processing package and not only will it check the spelling to you, but the grammar too (assuming that you trust the grammar algorithm). What is the other machine "Miss Jones" using in the main article picture?

You can write a database suite in whatever language you like. I have a modest record collection, 3000 bits of vinyl, 1200 CDs, 950 cassettes and 100 reel to reel tapes. I had these all indexed on cards, but the sheer number of index cards was unwieldy. Ten years ago I decided to chuck in all onto a database and since I had plenty of time, I decided that I was going to write the entire thing in bash (no MySQL or other database software), just pure bash. It uses a bunch of isam files, which are maintained purely with bash read/writes. It's damn quick too! The entire monster is 37K which runs the menus, the data entry screens and the reporting suite. This year I decided to chuck a GUI on to it; the tty interface is all well and good but the time had come for a refresh. I wanted to use the existing data structure, which is till perfectly functional. No data conversion, no dropping the entire lot into MySQl or similar. I coded it in Perl/TK which is very easy to code in. The result looks good and has bells and whistles which tty lacked. It's slower than the tty version, but is *possibly* more usable; my partner finds the tty version intimidating but copes OK with the GUI version. The real key to a database is the database design. Get that right and the coding exercise is trivial.

Video: Bruce Lee- ping pong master? (OK so it's a viral ad but still pretty good).

The short scale (ie 10^9) was adopted by the British government in 1974. Here is an extract from Hansard.

I've heard they turn a bright blue when they go off. I'd rather have some of this - Romulan Ale Energy Drink

Subterranea Britannica is the premier site for abandoned sites (see if there is an ROC bunker near to where you live). It's sister site Disused Railway Stations is quite good too.

I had a Novatech laptop 5 years ago, as did several other staff members, and they were the best laptops we had at the time, about double the battery life of the average laptop.

With the Gimp, use a vertical blind distort and then a polar co-ordinates distort. This will give you a circle of rays, so simply cut out the bit you want and use it as the background for a new image.

Agreed - it's a real beast of a system. I've had the unfortunate experience of administering three exchange servers and two of them completely lost the configuration settings and had to be reinstalled.

I buy most of mv DVDs from Australia as it works out cheaper, including the postage. Space 1999 is £40 a series locally and cost me £22 (inc postage) from Oz. The Addams Family was 3 x £19.99 locally (three series) or £37 (inc postage) for a box set of all three series from Oz.

If we smoked in the bushes around the school, we got the cane. If we sat under the staff room window (an out of bounds area) and smoked, the staff would warn us not to leave any litter when we left and then ignore us. Honesty is always the best policy.

Being of a "certain age", I reckon you can't go past Irish McCalla in . Far superior to Tanya Roberts or Gena Lee Nolin. was pretty good too and there was Bomba with Johnny Sheffield, but I didn't like that.

Transcode_Wiki: Transcode Wiki should be able to do it. I haven't tried this exact conversion, but I have used it to convert some pretty bizarre formats.

Ah the big iron days. It really meant something when you said you worked with computers. Today, everyone is a computer expert (or so they think). In the first 10 years of my career, computers changed very fast. Mini-computers such as the PDP-8 came out (50,000 units sold) and computers began to appear in smaller companies. Only really big companies like banks, insurance companies, ICI, General Motors, 3M, etc could afford machines such as the beloved IBM 360 series. $1,500,000 if I recall correctly and that was in 1975. With the development of the PC (the Personal Computer, your computer which sat on your desk) it all changed. It all could have been so exciting, but Microsoft came along, become dominant and stagnated development. Windows hasn't really changed much in 20 years, you just need more powerful hardware to run it. Windows 7 requires 1 GHz processor and 1 MB RAM to support one user. Why so much? I used to work on IBM System/1 and we ran 55 users with 128K RAM (character terminals) and 142K when we went to GUI. The world owes IBM and it's staff a huge debt. Common place IBM develoments include UPC (check your groceries for one), nondiscrimination work policy (in the 1950s, they were one of the first companies to develop one), the punch card, FET memory, the PC, electronic catalog (on-line shopping), the floppy disk, etc, etc. Happy birthday indeed Big Blue. Without you, I wouldn't be where I am today. (No, I'd probably be happily working as a haberdasher rather than being peed off in computer support. ) Musically, Microsoft gave us "bing, bong, bing bing"; IBM gave us IBM Rally Song

It sounds as though your /etc/network/if-up.d/mountnfs.sh is not running. Do ifdown/ifup and see if it is. It creates a directory /var/run/network/mountnfs - if dir exists before the script starts it will cause trouble, so you need to get rid of it.

What I've done in the past is export the SAM database via CSVDE, wrote an awk script to format a unix style passwd file and chuck the whole thing at John The Cracker. I doubt it is worth this for 40 passwords but it was for 950.

St Maarten features in a TV program, called something like The World's Most Dangerous Airports. Maybe on Quest. Here's a clip from the program

Here is a nice article from LinuxUser & Developer on the early days of Linux - Click Me. I especially like Dave Miller's admission.

When I worked in a school that ran Linux (customised LTSP on Fedora 9) we ran KDE 3.5, but that was 3 years ago. We also ran some stand alone machines (Compaq PIIIs) on which we used IceWM. If I was in a position to run Linux in the school environment today, I would most run either IceWM (most likely) or XFCE. Some long and rambling background info will now follow. I've just upgraded my o/s at home. A couple of years ago I installed Mandriva 2009, but with a manually installed KDE 3.5, as there was no way KDE 4 was ready. Mandriva wasn't my choice; I've always been a Redhat or Fedora user, but the then current release, which I think was Fedora 11, would not support my hardware RAID. Strangely enough, Fedora 10 did. Anyway, I wanted an RPM based distro, so it was either SuSE or Mandriva, and since I've had previous bad experiences with SuSE, I chose Mandriva. It has been OK, apart from a few minor annoyances, specifically if you run the GUI as root. (There was a red flash as the GUI fired up, which I couldn't find. If you left the default red root wallpaper, you wouldn't notice this, but if you change the wallpaper you do.) A couple of months ago, I decided to upgrade my o/s (but on the same hardware) and installed Fedora 14 and KDE 4. The KDE 4 was still not usable, IMO. There were many niggles; to cut a long story short, if you changed any of the default setting (especially icons), the taskbar didn't display correctly. As I had decided the time was right for KDE 4, I installed Mandriva 2010.2 and it was all OK (or so I thought). The annoying red flash was still there and noticeable too, as the default root wallpaper is blue. I did managed to find the cause this time and corrected it. The real show stopper came when I tried to run dual monitors. If I want to watch streaming TV, I plug my TV into the PC, as it is not very comfortable to have us all clustered around the PC monitor. Under KDE 3.5 this was not an issue, it just worked. However with KDE 4, the TV picture breaks up so badly, it is unwatchable. The only remedy was to disable the PC monitor and just use the TV (ie one monitor). So having again proven to myself the KDE 4 is not ready, I had the choice of either going back to KDE 3.5, which would be painful, or changing window managers. I decided to go IceWM, having had previous success with it. So, if I was in a school with Linux desktops, it would be IceWM. KDE applications play very well with it. and it is very easy to create your own theme. Users could customise this, if they knew what they were doing, but since this involves using vi or similar to setup user specific configuration files, I doubt it would be a problem. I can't see many students having the nowse to do this, so the "corporate" environment would be preserved. In any case, you can lock IceWM down very easily. I compiled my own as the default Mandiva rpm is icewm-light. This does not allow you to change anything from the defaults, and the clock, system manager, etc are disabled. There is one issue with IceWM. The temperature on the taskbar system monitor is always blank. It is trying to get the temperature from /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/??/temperature, but on Madriva this has been depreciated in favour of lm_sensors. Interestingly (or not!) the Mandriva compiled version still tries to read the temperature from the aforementioned place. This may or may not be an issue on other distros.

We used it exclusively in my previous school and as another poster said, teacher acceptance was the major stumbling block. The students didn't really care. We were completely Linux and there were minor compatibility issues with students bringing in work done on their home M$ Word; this mostly was if they had used an oddball font. We got around that by issuing each student with a modified version of the OpenCD, which contained Windows ports of all the software used on the student machines, and at the same software level. If they used this (the choice was theirs), then there were no compatibility issues. If they didn't (eg they had used M$ Word and saved in the then new docx format, which we couldn't open), we *might* convert them, depending on how busy we were, how we felt, etc. The only real stumbling block was Microsoft Access files; the Windows version of OO could import these but the Linux version couldn't (doh!). We used to tell the students to do database projects either in OO Base or MySQL.

It all the years that I've been running Microsoft networks (up to 2000 users), I've never bothered with a backup DC and guess what? I've never encountered a problem, even when the PDC has died. I guess if I got near 10,000 users I might add another DC. The worse situation I inherited was a DC which was also the file server. (This was at a well known niche retail company.) I managed to convince the board to purchase a separate file server, which was very lucky, as we had a major disk crash on the DC soon after the file server went live.

Yes! Birmingham Post - News - West Midlands News - Birmingham's Voyager computer fiasco slammed in report