Solved How realistic are my goals?

scottro said:
I very much agree with Espionage724. Many times, when I can't figure something out, I create a page on it, and explaining it the imagined reader helps me figure out what I need to do.
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Same with me. Another personal favourite is explaining the problem in detail to one or more other people on a whiteboard, I find that works in a similar way. There is something about verbalising it, drawing diagrams, and also the feedback from other people, even if they know nothing about the problem; the act of explaining it to them brings out the solution.
 
AlfredoLlaquet said:
In any case, my counter-advice for the OP is not to spend their money buying cheap laptops or refurbishing them.
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I kind of agree, but on the other hand, I do know of a lot of people who own older laptops running Windows 10, but for whatever reason (usually forgotten password) these machines are no longer functional, and they would probably benefit from having a new OS installed on them. FreeBSD probably wouldn't be a good choice, but maybe Mint or some other distro might be appropriate. On the other hand, once you fix something for someone, then you own any minor mishap that may occur with that machine until the end of time.
 
blackbird9 said:
However... setting up a business to buy up laptop disposals from larger companies, refurbish them, and then sell them on at a profit on platforms like ebay might be more realistic.
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Something along these lines might not be entirely outside the realms of possibility, but maybe the thing for me to do is to first gain a customer base by helping people who own older laptops still running Windows 10. Something to think about, because in my area I know of a few seniors who have totally given up on laptops because of the end of service thing, but maybe installing Linux on their machines might make them happy.
 
blackbird9 said:
While many of the complacent post-war western companies left quality on one side, the Japanese with their long tradition of craftmanship took it to heart and really perfected it.
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And not only did the management of Western companies not care about quality, but the rank and file production workers would sometimes deliberately sabotage the products they were manufacturing, because they were angry at the company they were working for. I had a good friend who worked at GM engine plant in Michigan, and he once told me that the workers would sometimes line up all of the gaps in the piston rings, on one particular cylinder, so that particular cylinder would have low compression, and the engine would always run a little bit rough. They deliberately did this for years and years, the cars were shipped to the dealers, but then when the factory eventually closed, no one could understand why. It is no wonder that the Japanese ate our lunch.
 
Cedric62 said:
And not only did the management of Western companies not care about quality, but the rank and file production workers would sometimes deliberately sabotage the products they were manufacturing, because they were angry at the company they were working for. I had a good friend who worked at GM engine plant in Michigan, and he once told me that the workers would sometimes line up all of the gaps in the piston rings, on one particular cylinder, so that particular cylinder would have low compression, and the engine would always run a little bit rough. They deliberately did this for years and years, the cars were shipped to the dealers, but then when the factory eventually closed, no one could understand why. It is no wonder that the Japanese ate our lunch.
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Another part of Japan's success was absolute job security, "job for life", long-term commitment on both sides; well, you know what we had...

And they had a long-term investment outlook within the business too, not just chasing this quarter's figures, "making the numbers", and the guy who runs the company will only be in the seat for a couple of years until he gets a big payoff and leaves, if it's even that long...
 
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blackbird9 said:
Another part of Japan's success was absolute job security, "job for life", long-term commitment on both sides; well, you know what we had...

And they had a long-term investment outlook within the business too, not just chasing this quarter's figures, "making the numbers", and the guy who runs the company will only be in the seat for a couple of years until he gets a big payoff and leaves, if it's even that long...
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within American manufacturing there was always a hostile attitude between management and labor. One time the Plant Manager of the facility I was working at invited me to play golf with him on the weekend. The news quickly got out among the hourly workers that I was going to socialize with the big boss, so the shop steward of our labor union came to me and said that if I played golf with management, they would kick me out of the union, and then I would be unemployed. Well, at that time I had young children still living at home, so I had to send my manger a text message declining our golf date. In retrospect I wish that I had gone against my union and played golf with my manager, because maybe if I did, I would have survived layoff which occurred in 2010.

In the US, both management and labor are unnecessarily hostile towards one another, and both view each other as a resource to be exploited. Well, again, it is no wonder that the Japanese ate our lunch.
 
Very interesting. I worked for Justice in Belgium. I say no more. I cant even work for any Federal government in Belgium for life. How ?
Reason : I dont put my signature on a paper you wrote and sucks ...
 
Alain De Vos said:
Very interesting. I worked for Justice in Belgium. I say no more. I cant even work for any Federal government in Belgium for life. How ?
Reason : I dont put my signature on a paper you wrote and sucks ...
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I used to have a friend who worked for the California Dept. of Justice back during the early 1990s. His job was to change the tapes on their mainframes, but what time he told a subordinate to do it. The subordinate accidentally overwrote an entire set of tapes with blank tapes, there by destroying several days worth of new data. But the funny thing is, these are the people whom we trusted to oversee our system of justice, and they were terrible at their jobs.
 
This seems different. The picture depends on which warps are lifted controlled by a program on punched cards , not partial coloring of a thread, which would be significantly more difficult to get right.
 
Cedric62 said:
Well, any information is welcome. Looks like the weekend is over, and now it is time for me to go back to arguing with my wife's insurance company.
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Late reaction, but... first of all I'd like to wish you guys all the best, tough times and I'm really hoping for the best... 😥

Anyway, I'm actually a systems administrator by profession and I've always had a strong personal interest in "I(C)T", Unix in specific. Started with Novell, then moved onto Sun Solaris and this eventually led me to FreeBSD which is actually one of my biggest "hobby projects". I maintain 2 semi-professional FreeBSD VPS servers which I use for lots of things (hosting websites, e-mail, DNS, a Minecraft server which my gf & me share...) and I also run a local Hyper-V FreeBSD box just for fun & giggles.

First, you probably already know this, but I cannot help myself from mentioning it anyway: the FreeBSD handbook is amazing. SO... wouldn't it be cool if you could have your own local copy of this handbook installed on your FreeBSD box? ;) That's how I once thought, and it led me to: pkg search handbook |more, and... nothing? :-/ "SO... how did they build that handbook anyway?", I wondered and that led me to the documentation project primer, in specific: chapter 3 (and 5).

Oh, btw... talk is cheap in hindsight, but I obviously should have used: pkg search freebsd |more :cool:

Anyway... one command later ( # pkg install -x en-freebsd-doc) and I had my own copy, cool! Then I spotted it: /usr/local/share/doc/freebsd/en/books/handbook/index.html. Now... I could just point Lynx, Firefox, or Konqueror (= KDE web browser) to this file and take it from there.

But wouldn't it be so much 'cooler' if I could enter some kind of "personal URL" (like, say: "http://handbook.intranet.lan") and then that would show me my local copy of the handbook? All you'd need... is some kind of webserver, and a way to get that URL resolved. One option could be a DNS server, which seems like overkill, and then I stumbled upon hosts(5) which would allow me to "link" my own names to existing stuff... even if I merely would like to "link" the name "handbook.intranet.lan" to what it essentially was all about: the localhost.

So I did.. I installed https/apache24, I edited the /etc/hosts file, made plenty of mistakes (!) but eventually it worked!

Here's the thing, Cedric (and the point I'm trying to make): ... I actually, and honestly, got a lot of pleasure and satisfaction out of all that ^ stuff. And it is that line of thinking that slowly, but steadily, led me to "more". But I could easily imagine that this may not apply to everyone, whatever you do: don't force stuff on yourself. The moment it stops being fun... it won't end well IMO.

These days I fully rely on the ports collection and /usr/src to keep my servers up to date. But that kinda started with me wondering how more (or less (lol)) actually worked. Next moment I grabbed the source tree, and I'm studying /usr/src/usr.bin/less which confused me to no end, but eventually I found my way to where I wanted to really be at: /usr/src/contrib/less.

Hope this could still help to give you some thoughts or impressions....
 
My 2 cents in this conversation: A job in IT, particularly in UNIX/Linux administration is probably unrealistic these days. Even if you get lucky enough to talk with a human being, most of the tech jobs postings in US are mass-produced by scammers as a means of harvesting personal information. I've been down that road, I know what that's like.

Certifications only make sense if you're already part of a big system that actually recognizes them as valid. If you (as someone random off the street) just get an A+ certification, don't expect to have a random employer be so impressed by that specific accomplishment that you'll get hired above all other applicants. That's been my experience.

Basically, have results and numbers that nobody can argue with. Yeah, reliance by the bosses on AI for nearly everything is pretty blind these days, but you can take advantage of that.
 
ShelLuser said:
Anyway... one command later ( # pkg install -x en-freebsd-doc) and I had my own copy, cool! Then I spotted it: /usr/local/share/doc/freebsd/en/books/handbook/index.html. Now... I could just point Lynx, Firefox, or Konqueror (= KDE web browser) to this file and take it from there.
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May be pandoc(1) can be used to convert the handbook to epub format for reading on an e-reader? See textproc/hs-pandoc.

ShelLuser said:
that kinda started with me wondering
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That is the key to most all interesting journeys!
 
Guys,

I don't know, what gotten into you recently and create a pointless panic about creating locally own versions of the Handbook.
There already is.

Apart from that, FreeBSD ain't no .com site, where some "C[..]O" suddenly decides, 'remove that two years old ancient obsolete garbage.'
FreeBSD is an established open source project. As long as FreeBSD exists, it will exist on .org, and so will the handbook.
I also really love to have real books actually printed on real paper. But in this case it makes very few sense. Because the HB is updated frequently, not only adapted to new FreeBSD versions, but also improved.
I also made this mistake myself several times, printed out software's handbooks. All you only produce is a buttload of wasted paper. Because two years at the latest large parts of it are outdated.
One can only hope if you printed it you printed it single sided, so you could use the back for scribbling paper. 🤓:cool:

Anyway, local copy:
There already IS a local copy of the whole FreeBSD documentation - HTML and PDF.

At the end of the installer the last point under "Final Configuration" is
"Install FreeBSD Handbook (requires network)"

On every new installtion I always check this one, 'cause it's not only a test if I configured the network right, but I don't spare that few Bytes and have the documentation locally on my machine for the case I need it without having access to FreeBSD.org.
If you did not installed it with the installation, then you can do it anytime:
pkg install freebsd-doc-all, to get everything (HB, dev's HB, porters HB, articles... - ~82MB on my 14.3-RELEASE-p10)
or
pkg install en-freebsd-doc if you only want the english version (20 languages available. pkg search freebsd-doc to see them all)

If installed, you find it under
file:///usr/local/share/doc/freebsd/

file:///usr/local/share/doc/freebsd/en/books/handbook/
contains just the english version of the handbook, two times:
handbook_en.pdf as PDF
index.html the HTML version, exactly like using it on FreeBSD.org.

P.S.:
I can only repeat it:
file:///usr/local/share/doc/
is a goldmine.
It's worth to dig it. Just see what documentation besides man pages is all on your machine.
Good documentation. Valuable to read. Not seldom even actually enlighting.
Because that's good, exemplary Unix style: Having good, up to date, but above all all and even more, advanced documentation locally on your machine, even if for whatever reasons there is no internet connection. And not all that 404 nuisance crap. 🤓

<[smart-ass on]>👆🥸
Learning Unix above all means reading documentation.
This requires first to learn which documentation there is, and where it can be found.
That's exactly why every (even only halfway usable) Unix book always has a chapter, most of the times at the very beginning, 'Where to find documentation.'
FreeBSD HB "1.3.5 Additional Documentation"
Absolute FreeBSD "Chapter 1: Getting More Help"
Unix Power Tools "2. Getting Help"
UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook Chapter 1, pages 16 to 28
[...]
<[smart-ass off]> 😁:cool::beer:
 
ShelLuser said:
The moment it stops being fun... it won't end well IMO
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Well, for me using FreeBSD wasn't very much fun at first, and I did cause a lot of my own problems in the very beginning, but now things seem to have reached the point that it is no longer such a chore for me to use this operating system. Actually, most of the time I'm not even aware that I'm using FreeBSD on my personal computer, and since I now have my Xfce desktop configured pretty much the same the same as I did with Ubuntu, sometimes I kinda forget that I'm now driving a completely different operating system than before.

Also, I downloaded a PDF copy of the handbook, and I usually try and read through that before I go to the Internet. So far for me, my two greatest resources have turned out to be the older posts within this forum, the handbook itself, and maybe my own experimentation and learning. I haven't really tried to read the handbook cover to cover, and instead I try to use it like a reference manual, and usually it gives me a good enough understanding that I can then somewhat try to understand whatever problem I may be having on that particular day.

Additionally, at the very start of my adventures with FreeBSD, I soon realized that there would be instances in which my PC might become unstable, and that I would have to have a reliable of quickly getting it up and running in usable state again. I know that using ZFS and creating snapshots is the preferred way to do things, but I didn't do that, and instead I got into recovering from a disaster by doing a quick reinstall, and then using rsync to restore backed up directories located on a second physical hard drive within my PC. Most FreeBSD users would probably look at this as a very inefficient way of doing things, but newbie, it is better than nothing. Right now, if my computer were to suddenly become unusable, I should be able to restore it in less than an hour. However, I know that I should adopt ZFS and making snapshots, but for now, the system I have works.

Also, my local library didn't have much in the way of book on FreeBSD or Unix, but I did manage to find a book titled, UNIX Third Edition, by Deborah S. Ray & Eric J. Ray. Before I read this book, I wasn't really sure what /bin/sh meant. It is amazing how ignorant I was back when I first started, but now I'm getting past the point of simple dog paddling.
 
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