Wow, a Pentium Pro, anybody got a skillet and some eggs (I hear it doubles as a hotplate.)
I appreciate what you had to say Garl. I would love to tinker with software and hardware. But we all saw what VLSI of microprocessors did to the hardware tech, Field Replaceable Units and all (I was reading about the all-in-one chip just the other day in the WSJ.) The rise of OSS, its stability, and Self-healing server software will do the same for sysops. Not much of a career choice in my opinion, good for the person who is there, but entry-level I can't see it. I worked as a land surveyor for a number of years. I got my start in the military, where I worked with GPS when it was "selective availability" and "antispoofing." Control of the signal (S/A) and introduction of erroneous data (A/S) required that civil engineering firms would have to buy $100,000 satellite tracking emulators to decode the signal and derive coordinates. Look where GPS is at today. I went from working in a seven man crew, with printed log tables, to three man crews, with TI calculators, to two man crews, with HP sx and gx. Now its one man with a GPS unit. Not much of a future there either. My future is in documenting technological change. Making it palatable to the non-technician. Now that is a future! I'm trying to look 50 years into the future, get ahead of the curve, so to speak. I see a illustrative style in the development of documentation of technology will be used today to define that future. Check out http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/visualize0603.asp to see how to turn turkey bones into oil for an example of what I'm talking about. This is a crude example. I see the use of 3D modeling as the real "eye candy" that's why I'm looking at Blender 3D rendering software. Its not the best but its OSS. Fifty years out I don't see any Microsoft. With the DoD using OSS for security and the huge budgets they have, IT and technology will come down on the side of OSS. I don't think I'm telling anybody anything new here. Its just a premise to the "space entrepreneurship argument" I've been making. I don't want to see a militarized space, but I see a lot of good technology in monitoring farming from space, as an example. We'll probably have to fight for the right to define the future of space development and associated technologies. That's why I'm involved with OSS and ... to get out of this near minimum wage job I'm in now. This does have pertinence to this group. It speaks to the motivation of our activities around OSS and why we want to help each other. Yes, I found ifconfig Ken. _______________________________________________ EuG-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug