Comment Your complaint has been heard... (Score 1) 287
Thank you for your complaint - please remain seated and an NSA agent will be by soon to "assist" you....
Submission + - The Amish Are Getting Fracked (newrepublic.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Old school meets business school: "The Amish interpretation of the Christian bible prohibits the use of the courts: Except in rare circumstances, the Amish do not sue. This has created a unique problem in the region. Home to the largest Amish community in the world, Eastern Ohio sits squarely on top of the Utica and Marcellus Shale formations, which contain billions in oil and gas recoverable through advances in hydraulic fracturing technology, or fracking.. ... When it comes to the oil and gas industry, this means that any agreement an Amish farmer makes with a company is, for the farmer, practically unenforceable. A rare case in which the plaintiffs were Amish suggests that Ohio’s oil and gas companies know this and have been willing to take advantage. "
Submission + - Film crew to dig up Atari landfill site, maybe score 3.5 million copies of E.T. (arstechnica.com)
Joe_NoOne writes: A documentary crew has received approval to dig up the New Mexico desert site where Atari supposedly buried millions of unsold pieces of Atari 2600 software and hardware. The crew hopes to finally confirm or refute one of gaming's most enduring urban legends.This year marks what will be the 30 year anniversary of the assumed September 1983 burial, which came during the height of the great video game crash. That sudden market reversal supposedly left Atari with millions of unsold and unsalable cartridges and systems, which were dumped in an Alamogordo landfill and later covered in concrete.
Comment Sad confession of a Unix Admin (Score 1) 448
For background - I'm a hard-core Unix Administrator (professionally) for the last 15 years (supporting SGI Irix, HP-UX, Solaris, RedHat, VMWare, etc...) who's mantra is "GUI's are for lazy people" and approach tasks from the concept of "what can you do when the system is down and you're using a VT term".
However, as much as I hate to say it, each time I try switching my home systems to Linux there is always something seemingly simple (in Windows) that after days/weeks researching I can never get working, so I go back to windows. Wi-FI? Forget it. Winamp replacements to listen to streaming audio? Forget it. Gnome3 desktop on dual monitors to work right? Forget it. Yes, I've tried lots of different distros, but I always eventually find SOMETHING that I can do easily on Windows that I can't do with Linux (and lets not even talk about games).
I can't even imagine trying to explain to a novice about device drivers and how to find, install, and make sure they work. Oh, you are trying to get your WiFi/Sound/Video card working? No, you have to search by the chips it uses, not the brand name. How do you find that? Depends on the distro which tools you can use. How do you add new software? Well, check your dependcies ("What are those???"), make sure those and their respective dependencies are installed ("How? Depends on your distro what tools it has...") and then install the app you want. Oh, it requires a kernel patch to work?
Gimme the damn Windows install disk.....
Submission + - Dennis Ritchie, C Programmer And Unix Co-Creator, (npr.org)
Joe_NoOne writes: Dennis Ritchie is being remembered today as a pioneering computer scientist, the "father of [the] C programming language," co-creator of the Unix operating system and "a 'titan' of the [computer] industry whose influence was largely unknown."
Ritchie, 70, has died. The news was confirmed this morning by Alcatel-Lucent, which owns the Bell Labs where Ritchie worked from 1967 until his retirement in 2007.
Ritchie, 70, has died. The news was confirmed this morning by Alcatel-Lucent, which owns the Bell Labs where Ritchie worked from 1967 until his retirement in 2007.
Comment Wheee.... (Score 1) 169
Yea, and us old-hat Solaris Admins are left to mire in the bog that is now Oracle/Sun post-merger with many of our clients sick of their new [lack of] support so much so that we now have to port entire data centers over to RedHat and realize that all those years of Solaris experience on our resume will soon mean nothing... Thanks USA/Oracle!!!!
Comment Re:You're not an admin. (Score 1) 592
Nah, I'm old-school. I never claimed expertise in Perl, just use it on occasion. Awk is my weapon of choice because "Back in my day that's all we had, and we LIKED it that way"....
By the way, never seen memory referenced by Kilowatts before - is that the current draw of the vacuum tubes in use?
Comment Re:You're not an admin. (Score 1) 592
No, compiling is for the Apps people, not us admins.
Your ID isn't much higher than mine. Are you so young you didn't have to write your own admin tools? Now I feel really old.
Sure, I've written lots of tools, but I never had to use a compiler for them. Shell scripts are all you need. Awk & Perl are the closest I come to programming languages generally speaking.
Comment Re:You're not an admin. (Score 1) 592
No, compiling is for the Apps people, not us admins. Besides, it's not as impressive a Web Server written in Postscript
Comment Re:Rebooting (Score 2) 592
No, it's simpler than that - Developers and Applications people never bother with (or even think about) start/stop scripts, so after a reboot none of the applications are working (or working right because dependent applications aren't running) and they all blame the Unix Admin when after a reboot everything doesn't work right and expect us to fix their messes...
Stupid lUsers.......
Comment Dell MediaDirect (Score 1) 394
Sounds similar to Dell's MediaDirect...
