Just wanted to put up this link to an article I wrote for SALUG showing some of the uses a UNIX Systems Administrator has for the AWK programming language.
Probably not interesting to non-technical types.
A product WAY ahead of its time and a bit of nostalgia…
From Byte Magazine in April of 1995: The AeroComm GoPrint.
This was a wireless print server that I installed for the Catholic Office of Religious Education in Mobile some time between 1995 and 1998, while I worked for Computer Technical Services. Another uninteresting story about ORE is that about two years ago, I found out my first grade teacher was working there…
At any rate, these little things were cool. In 1995, they could create a small, server-less printer “network.” You’d connect the base station to the parallel port on your printer, and connect a unit to the parallel port of each of your PCs. It seems like you could connect up to 6 PCs at the time. The thing knew how to spool print jobs from all 6 PCs, and keep them separate. Not only that, but the thing worked with DOS! Keep in mind Windows 95 had just come out, and was not being widely adopted at this point, so you could forget about networks. If you wanted a network back in the DOS days, you were most likely talking about Novell, and that was a very costly option a small office like the ORE could just not afford. Back to the point.. the damn thing just worked. No muss, no fuss.
The only printer sharing we’d done prior to this, was one of those crappy A B parallel switch boxes hooked up backwards. The box normally worked to switch 2 printers to 1 PC. By plugging 2 PCs and 1 printer, users were able to switch the printer back and forth between themselves. If you were on PC A, and the switch was set to B, your print job just landed in the bit-bucket. As I recall, DOS didn’t do much to check that there was actually a printer on the other end of that parallel port…
This was WELL before 802.11b had ever been heard of.
In fact, if I’m not wrong, this was before I’d ever even set up a network before… Let alone even heard of a print server. So, this thing was cool, and way ahead of its time. I don’t know if it sold very well. I think it was pretty expensive, but still much less than buying a server for Novell, licensing the software, buying ethernet (or Token Ring… eww) cards for every PC in the place, having cable drops made, and paying someone to put it all together.
Here’s a pic of one of the client side devices.
Obscene Profits.
If you're worried about how much money the oil companies have recently made, or the fact that they're making record profits, don't. There's something else you should be concerned about even more.
Even with the recent supply and distribution problems caused by the hurricanes, the “windfall” profits the oil companies have made amount to an average of $0.10 per gallon of gasoline sold in the US.
Ok, fine. 10 cents per gallon. It may be more than the 8 cents or whatever they were making before.
The thing that blows me away is that on a national average, the federal, state, and local taxes charged for every gallon of gas sold amount to more than $0.46. That's almost five times what the people who actually MAKE the stuff get! What the hell?!
Let's say you were selling ice cream cones for $3.00 a pop. And say it cost you $2.44 to pay your employess to make, distribute, and sell your ice cream cones. That would leave you with $0.56 cents of profit. Except that the government (who had absolutely nothing to do with the production of your ice cream cones) holds out their hand for $0.46 cents of that… Why would you even want to bother making ice cream cones any more?
Now, in reality, the oil companies are not paying these taxes. They are added to the gallon price you see at the pump. So the ice cream scenario doesn't quite wash, but I wanted to tell a story about ice cream cones, and this seemed like as good a time as any. Either way, before you start complaining about the greedy oil companies, you should first be mad at the local, state, and federal taxes that have been approximately 5 times that greedy for years.
One of the recurrent themes I've noticed about democrats is that they complain about greed a lot. Greed isn't illegal for the most part, unless someone statisfies that greed through illegal means (like embezzlement, etc…). However, {elected} democrats and even some republicans have used it as a tool for years… Get the poor and middle class to vote for them by claiming that they'll punish the greedy rich. And of course, they'll do it for good reasons… like… I don't know… welfare programs… So, they want to soak the greedy rich for “a good cause.”
True conservatives differ significantly from this. Even the poor and middle class (where I am) among us. That is because poor and middle class conservatives know that greed is an excellent motivator. Some day, they wish to become the greedy rich. We think greed is good and acceptible, as long as two conditions are met. The first rule being that you don't do anything illegal. Greed on the part of corporations is also fine, as long as they don't break rule number one. Corporations provide jobs for people who would otherwise have none. Enron broke rule number one, so they get punished.
The second rule is that while greed is good among individuals and corporations, government greed is inherently wrong because government doesn't actually produce anything. This is not to say that government is useless. Only that (in Ciba parlance), they are not a profit-center, they are a COST-center. When I worked at Ciba, the IT department was always poorly treated because they did not produce any profit for the company. It mattered little that the IT department provided an essential service, when time were tough, the cost-centers were always put under close watch before the profit centers were. The government also provides essential services. But at Ciba, the IT department still managed to get away with just about anything without being fired, and we didn't have an annual budget of $6 trillion.
