computoman

Years ago there real was not a terminal that you could cozy up to to do your computing. In the beginning  there was a punch card machine. You would type in your data, your program in to 80 column punch cards. On this cards you would also have to number them. If the cards went into a pile, there would be an unpleasant experience reorganizing them. Used one of these for writing programs in Fortran. Eventually systems came with enough storage, that you did not need to carry the punch cards and you could print out what you keyed in and the results of what you were working on with the printing terminal. Finance company I worked for had one of thes that connected to an acoustical modem contract the credit bureau.. The finally we get a crt soft of like a tv with a keyboard.  Worked much like the printing terminal. You could even edit what you were working on in real time. Saved a lot of paper. You can not see it very well but the text was in green. Used one of these ...

#! /bin/sh # Title: #    netxfer.sh # # Author: #    Karl Mowatt-Wilson #    http://mowson.org/karl #    copyright: 2007 Karl Mowatt-Wilson #    licence: GPL v2 # # Revisions: #    v0.1  - 21 Jun 2007 - first release #    v0.11 - 23 Jun 2007 - add 'readability' check of full image path #    v0.12 - 23 Jun 2007 - improve readability check #    v0.13 -  6 Jul 2007 - add 'tail' of syslog #                        - put port numbers in variables #                        - use getopts #                    ...

You are probably using Linux without even knowing it. http://venturebeat.com/2012/04/03/invisible-linux/

According to this news report from https://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9221717/PC_makers_should_brace_for_drive_shortages , hard drives will be in short supply for about a year. How can you get around that? There are several ways to do it. Some of which I have talked about a little before. Well you operate the computer without a hard drive. At first that seems ludicrous. but it is actually very viable. There are two ways that this can be done. Both are based on what is known as the PXE or pre-execution environment where the hardware in the network interface card can load all or part of an operating system into a computer from the network. A major advantage of using diskless clients is that all software management can be one from virtually just one point. All software maintenance and upgrades are done on the server(s). That means, you do not have to send out a software technician to a user's desk to maintain the software on their system. Reduced Information technology suppor...

Why do we throw so much stuff away? Maybe there is a case for the management of this country both business and government to become a bit more technically knowledgeable. We need to teach them or alert them on ways to become more reusable conscious so to speak. in his article: http://www.instructables.com/id/Electronics-for-teaching-children/ the author points out there is so much good equipment that can be reused with just a bit of street science smarts. Imagine how much overburdened school systems could save you in tax dollars if they were a bit street science smart. Where I used to work, my former employer sent off to auction literally thousands and thousands dollars worth of equipment that could have been re-purposed. For example an old Dell GX110 which sold for nickels and dimes at auction could have been converted to a disk-less thin client (see http://www.instructables.com/id/PC-personal-computer-into-a-sort-of-thin-client/ for an article on how to do this). They were replac...

Had an old machine that had some problems with the ide (legacy hard disk) controller. Though most machines now use what is called "sata", I did not want to throw it away. Actually this is a great idea for small offices, schools. and even families. Instead of having to buy all new computers, you can purchase one machine as a server and then just reuse the existing machines as thin clients. A tremendous money saving move. That is what we did and saved a fortune. If you go completely open source, you do not have to worry paying for software licenses either. It saved us ten thousand dollars to dump proprietary software in addition not having to buy new hardware. So really it saved us much more than ten thousand dollars. Also you are helping to save the environment not to have the old machines go to a landfill. Happen to be talking with an MSWindows admin about disaster recovery. He was talking about how it was a challenge to do recovery. I made a bet that I could ...