College Of University

Have you recently decided that you would like to take up fish keeping as a hobby? If so, have you already developed of collection of fish to display in your home or in your office? Regardless of which type of fish you would like to purchase, you will need to buy an aquarium, if you haven’t already done so. Unfortunately, when it comes to purchasing a fish tank, there are many individuals who make a costly mistake. That mistake is purchasing a fish tank that it is too small. In addition to wasting money, by purchasing a fish tank that isn’t want you need, you may also be endangering the lives of your fish. That is why it is extremely important that you choose the right fish tank for your fish and their needs.

When it comes to choosing the right size fish tank, you may find it a little bit difficult to do your own research. Despite being difficult, it is possible to do. For example, you can examine the type of fish that you would like to purchase, namely their overall size and their swimming habits. If you purchase a type of fish that is expected to grow in size or one that likes to swim all over the tank, you are advised to purchase a large fish tank. A large fish tank, such as a large acrylic aquarium, will give your fish the room that they need to swim, socialize, and grow. If you are unsure as to what size aquarium you should purchase, it may be best to seek professional assistance.

When it comes to obtaining professional assistance, when choosing the right size fish tank, you have a number of different options. One of those options involves speaking to the individual who you are purchasing your fish from. Most fish store employees are educated on the fish that they have available for sale, as well as their needs. It is also possible for you to acquire the same type of information by speaking to a fish tank supplier or a fish tank manufacturer. This is because there are some manufacturers who develop fish tanks specifically for a certain type of fish. That is why most fish tank manufacturers, as well as their suppliers, are more than familiar with most fish and the tank sizes that they need.

Although it is advised that you keep your fish in mind, when choosing which size fish tank you need to purchase, you may also want to think big. If you are unable to find the answers to your questions, as to what size aquarium you need to purchase, you may have better luck going with a large, oversized aquarium. When many fish keepers think of oversized a 1000 gallon fish tank comes to mind. In reality, a 1000 gallon fish tank is huge. In fact, these 1000 gallon fish tanks, which are often referred to as ultaquariums, are sometimes only sold as custom built aquariums.

For those are just starting to experiment with the fish keeping hobby, 50 to 100 gallon fish tanks are often considered the most sought after or most purchased sized aquariums. This is because smaller fish tanks are more affordable than larger fish tanks, such as a 150 gallon fish tank or a 300 gallon fish tank. However, as previously mentioned, you are advised to keep your fish in mind. If you have your heart set on purchasing large tropical fish, a 50 to 100 gallon fish tank may not be enough room. What is nice about aquariums is that they come in a number of different sizes, shapes, and styles. There are so many different sizes, including 50 gallon fish tanks, 90 gallon fish tanks, 100 gallon fish tanks, and 300 gallon fish tanks, that you are sure to find exactly what you need.

To ensure that your fish are living as comfortably as they possibly can, you need to make sure that you are about to purchase or did purchase the correct size aquarium. The wrong size aquarium, especially if it is too small, can have dangerous and deadly consequences for your new pets.

What is a BSD Unix?

BSD family of Unix systems is based upon the source code of real Unix developed in Bell Labs, which was later purchased by the University of California – “Berkeley Software Distribution”. The contemporary BSD systems stand on the source code that was released in the beginning of 1990’s (Net/2 Lite and 386/BSD release).

BSD is behind the philosophy of TCP/IP networking and the Internet thereof; it is a developed Unix system with advanced features. Except for proprietary BSD/OS, the development of which was discontinued, there are currently four BSD systems available: FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Mac OS X, which is derived from FreeBSD. There are also various forks of these, like PC-BSD – a FreeBSD clone, or MirOS, an OpenBSD clone. The intention of such forks is to include various characteristics missing in the above BSD systems, on which these (forks), no matter how well they are designed, only strongly depend. PC-BSD, for example, has more graphical features than FreeBSD, but there are no substantial differences between these two. PC-BSD cannot breathe without FreeBSD; FreeBSD or OpenBSD are independent of one another.

What is Linux?

Albeit users like to use the term “Linux” for any Linux distro including its packages (Red Hat Linux, Mandrake Linux, etc.), for IT professionals Linux is only the kernel. Linux started in 1991, when its author, Linus Torvals, began his work on a free replacement of Minix. Developers of quite a few Linux system utilities used the source code from BSD, as both these systems started parallelly in about the same time (1992-1993) as Open Source.

Today, there are a few, if not many developers of their own kernels/operating systems (FreeDOS, Agnix, ReactOS, Inferno, etc.), but these guys simply missed the right train in the right hour. They did not lose anything except for the fact that they may be even better programmers, but without the public opinion acknowledging this at large. Linus built his fame also from work of many developers and he went on board in the right time. Linus deserves a credit as a software idea policy maker and he helped very much in this respect.

(Open)BSD vs Linux

It is often difficult to say what is better if you compare two things without regarding the purpose of their use. Mobile Internet may appear better for someone who travels often, but for people working at home such mobility is not necessary. In this view, it is a stupid question when someone asks: “What is better, a mobile or static Internet?” It all depends…

If you compare Linux and OpenBSD in their desktop environment features, Linux offers more applications than OpenBSD; but in a server solution BSD systems are known to be robust, more stable and secure, and without so many patches distributors release soon after their new version of Linux slithered to light.

BSD systems are based upon real Unix source code contrary to Linux, which was developed from scratch (kernel).

Differences between BSD and Linux

1) BSD license allows users/companies to modify a program’s source code and not to release changes to the public. In other words, BSD licenses allow commercial use and incorporation of a code into proprietary commercial products. This is how Microsoft incorporated BSD networking into their products and how Mac OS X earns money through muscles of FreeBSD.

Linux uses GPL license for most of the time (applications in Linux can also have a BSD license – or any license; it is up to developers how they decide). With a GPL-licensed program anybody can change the source code, but he or she MUST share it with the Open Source community to make sure that everybody will benefit from such a change.

2) BSD has the so-called “core system” (without packages). The core system consists of basic utilities (like ssh, fdisk, various commands like chmod or sysctl, manual pages, etc.) and anything beyond this is strictly seen as an add-on. Linux (not only the kernel, of course) is usually packaged as the whole system where this difference is not seen.

3) On BSD systems, all add-on packages are strictly installed into the /usr/local directory: documents to user/local/share/docs/application_name; themes and other things to /usr/local/share/application_name; binaries to /usr/local/bin/application_name. By application_name we mean a program’s name, so if you install IceWM, for example, its binary will be here: /usr/local/bin/icewm. With Linux, on the other hand, all applications get mostly installed into the /usr/bin directory.

4) BSD systems use the system of “ports”, which are fingerprints of applications in the /usr/ports directory, where a user may “cd” and execute a make command, which will download, via a directive contained in such a fingerprint’s code, the application’s source and the system will compile it as well. “Ports” are actually add-on packages for BSD systems and they are also packaged in packages repository of a concrete BSD system. They can be installed as binaries, too, with use of the “pkg_add” either directly from the Internet or locally. But “ports” have that advantage that if an author of any package makes a new version, a user can immediately get its newest/updated version. Packages released for a particular BSD version (like OpenBSD 4.1) are not updated and users have to wait for a new BSD release (like OpenBSD 4.2).

5) BSD systems have also their stable version. With FreeBSD, for example, you have a FreeBSD-Release (a version that can be used normally), FreeBSD-Stable (system more profoundly audited for bugs and security holes), and a development version – Current, which is not stable and not recommended for a regular use. Some Linux distributions started to imitate this philosophy, but with BSD systems this way of making distributions has become a rule.

6) Of course, the kernel is absolutely different.

7) BSD has FFS file system; it is the only file system on BSD’s contrary to Linux, where you can use dozens of file systems like ext2, ext3, ReiserFS, XFS, etc.

BSD systems divide their partitions internally. This means that after installing a BSD system to a hard disk, programs like fdisk, Partition Magic, Norton Ghost and many others will not see this internal division of a BSD (FFS) disk; thus, repartitioning of a disk is not such a pain when administrators require a rigorous partitioning (for /home, /tmp, /var, /etc directories). As a consequence, the naming convention also differs a little: a disk – /dev/ad0s3b in FreeBSD indicates that you deal with “slice” 3 (”s3″), which is the equivalent of Linux /dev/hda3; the internal “partition” has the name of a letter: “a”, “b”, “e”, etc. (”b” is a swap partition). BSD systems also use different naming conventions for devices (disks, etc.).

9) Unless you make a good kernel hack, BSD systems can only be installed into the primary partition. This is not the rule with Linux. However, as BSD systems offer the above-mentioned internal division of partitions, this is not any pain. PC architecture for disks (IDE) follows the rule that you can have only four primary partitions. We will illustrate this on Linux: /dev/hda1 (note: first partition on master disk on first IDE channel), /dev/hda2 (second partition), /dev/hda3 (third partition), /dev/hda4 (fourth partition). PC architecture allows creation of the so-called logical disk on a physical disk (/dev/hda5, /dev/hda6, etc.). You can have as many logical disks/partitions as you wish and you can also install Linux into these “logical disks”. On the other hand, installing a BSD OS into such a “logical partition” is not normally possible.

10) System configuration is manual for most of the time, but various clones like PC-BSD break this convention. The manual approach is a very good thing, as administrators have everything under control without being pushed to waste time in a labyrinth of bloated configuration menus. A good comparison is to imagine a car mechanic repairing the car’s engine c
overed by a thick blanket. To give you even a little better example – you will hardly find a Linux distro that does not have a default X startup (graphical environment). Of course, you can switch off the X environment during the installation configuration, but if you keep forgetting like me and forget to switch this off, or you have difficulties to find it in the menu somewhere, you realize that most Linux distributors do indeed impose on us only one approach – to put our fingers first on the thick blanket, then on the engine. If you are a good administrator, you do not usually trust vendors who program you how to use Linux – you are the boss and you must have your own freedom. However, in most cases you lose few hours instead by deactivating various services, which are, unfortunately, not even necessary but almost always activated by default. Linux is praised both for being a good desktop and server, but administrators of a good server do not need X. The more software is stored on your hard disk, the more security problems you will face, because it is impossible to audit every package in every unthinkable situation. Good and secure systems are always tight, light and simple.

11) All BSD systems have a Linux emulation support. Running BSD binaries on Linux is a little harder.

12) BSD systems have less support from driver vendors, thus they lag behind in this view (they are not worse, but many vendors support only Microsoft and Linux). With a BSD system you must carefully research the Internet for supported products/chipsets before purchasing any hardware.

13) BSD systems do not use the Unix System V “runlevel scripts” (initialization startup scripts) like Linux.

14) BSD kernels can be set to several security levels. This is also possible with Linux, but BSD’s have taken a very good care of this kernel-tuning feature, which makes it even impossible to change something in files in higher security levels – you cannot delete them.

15) BSD’s have everything under one ROOF. Various Linux programs are often not even compatible with other Linuces. For example, if you install a SuSE RPM package on Mandrake, it may not work. BSD’s have one solid crown of power. If you move from Linux to FreeBSD, you will soon find out that you got out of this chaos. Do you want a package? Just visit: http://www.freebsd.org/ports/ and download it. Unless its developer made some programming errors, it will always work.

16) Generally, BSD systems boot and reboot faster than Linux. Linux can do this, too, but it must be tuned. It is very surprising that Linux is shipped, on the one hand, on huge DVD’s and, on the other hand, it has a compressed kernel. BSD systems do not use (but they can) a default kernel that is compressed, thus the system boots always faster. As I mentioned earlier in this article, Linux vendors program users to use various, often unnecessary services. I do not need SAMBA (file and print services) and many other things as well. Linux reboot process takes longer because various services running on Linux need time for deactivation. Many Linux users do not even know what is the purpose of these services.

17) In comparison to BSD, most Linux distributions are overbloated. Few good users noticed this some time ago and a new trend in the Linux world started with ideas to get closer to a BSD-style use. One of such distributions is Gentoo Linux, but also Slackware Linux, which has preserved a very good shape since its first release (1993). The Gentoo “About” page (http://www.gentoo.org) says that, “Gentoo is a free operating system based on either Linux or FreeBSD…” Therefore, if you use Slackware or Gentoo, these Linuces will always reboot faster than any other Linux.

18) If you compile programs from ports, you will not stumble into compilation errors. BSD packagers prepare their packages carefully, so that users will always compile them successfully. This does not always happen with Linux.

Conclusion

I am the author of One Floppy CD Audio and MP3 Player, and a single floppy OpenBSD router. I really like all BSD systems. If you are interested, look into FreeBSD documentation, which is one of the best. It will give you a very good overview of history and hard work done in the development of these robust systems. Today, BSD Unices are the only quality alternative to Linux in the Open Source world.

Copyright (c) Juraj Sipos

Author’s website about FreeBSD and OpenBSD

University College London

Contact:

UCL (University College London)

University of London

Gower Street

London

WC1E 6BT

Tel: (020) 7387 2000

Online:

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/

http://www.uclunion.org/

Interesting Facts:

64% of students at UCL are undergraduates

UCL has done very well in recent research assessments, beating Oxford and Cambridge in many subject areas. They also have 18 Nobel Prizes under their belt.

Brett Anderson (Suede), Alexander Graham Bell (Inventor of the Telephone), Rabbi Lionel Blue (Writer and Broadcaster), Coldplay ( The Entire Band), Francis Crick ( Discovered DNA), Jonathan Dimbleby (Broadcaster), Mahatma Gandhi (Indian Politician), David Gower (Cricketer), Jonathan Miller (Writer and Director), Sir Eduardo Paolozzi ( Artist and Sculptor), Marie Stopes (Birth Control Pioneer), Victoria Barnsley, Harper Collins, Digby Jones (Confederation of British Industry), Mark Lawson (Writer and Broadcaster) Christopher Nolan (Film Director), Robert Browning ( Poet), Ross Wright (Serious Fraud Squad), Alex Comfort (Author -The Joy of Sex), David Baddiel (Comedian), Ricky Gervais (Comedian/Actor), Raj Persaud (Psychiatrist) and Jonathan Ross (Broadcaster) all attended UCL.

Guides:

UCL libraries hold more than 1,500,000 books, with over 1,500 workstations. The Main Library is under the dome at Gower Street, while the new Medical Library boasts some of the best medical resources in Europe. There is also a large Science Library, and 12 specialist libraries. Many departments also have collections. UCL students, like all University of London students, can use the main University’s Senate House library. There are a quite a few computer areas, but these tend to be in the Libraries. There is some 24 hour access, but not in the main library facilities. The computer facilities are quite up to date and many have flat screen monitors. Some of the new or renovated Halls also have Internet access and there are plans to extend this further. UCL have many sports facilities, but these sometimes come at a price. They own Shenley which is Watford’s training ground. The Argentinean national team also played here before playing England. The facilities boast 10 floodlit pitches for football, rugby, cricket, etc. 6 grass tennis courts, and some hard courts. There are also brand new changing rooms, a bar and conference rooms. The Bloomsbury Fitness Centre was refurbished in the summer of 2003 and renamed Bloomsbury Fitness. The membership fee is £120 pa for UCL students, but the facilities are quite good and certainly cheaper than other London health clubs. On the whole, disabled facilities are quite good with ramps and lifts in most places. However, this can depend greatly on the department. Some further changes can be made if required. The University handle counselling with 3 full time advisors and part-time psychiatrists. The Student Union has a Rights and Advice Centre, which can advise on topics like housing, drugs, immigration and finance. There are also a number of welfare groups, like the LGB Society. Parking is very expensive so it is best to take public transport which, despite some complaints, is quick and easy. The Union have also negotiated good deals with London transport for student travel cards etc. The University has recently downsized its retail offering by removing the travel shop and making the copy centre for union business only. However, there is still the well stocked general shop called Bear Necessities and a hairdresser. There is a huge branch of Waterstones nearby, just across the street from ULU. There is also a second hand bookshop on the 3rd floor every Friday. This is particularly good for English, Classics and History students. There is a NatWest Bank on the main college site, as well as a HSBC cash machine. In the Student Union there is a Lloyd’s cash machine. There are branches of every major UK bank within walking distance.

Where is my nearest…

…PUB?

The Northumberland Arms is 0.19 miles away on Tottenham Court Road.

…CLUB?

0.36 miles away on Goodge Street is The Capricorn.

…CINEMA?

The Horse Hospital is 0.42 miles away on Colonnade.

…TAKEAWAY?

There is a Subway on Melton Street just 0.18 miles from the university.

…OFF LICENCE?

0.50 miles away is Nicolas (UK) Ltd on Great Portland Street.

…GYM/ LEISURE CENTRE?

The nearest is Energy Base on Malet Street 0.17 miles from the university.

…SUPERMARKET?

Superby is the nearest supermarket 0.20 miles away on Grafton Way but there is also a Sainsbury’s Local just 0.16 miles from Uni on Tottenham Court Road.

…SHOPPING CENTRE?

Chocolat Chocolat is just 0.42 miles from the University in the Brunswick Centre.

…DENTIST?

Jones is 0.07 miles away on Gower Place.

…DOCTOR?

Just 0.10 miles from the university on Grafton Way is Dr M Adifeshiah.

…OPTICIANS?

0.17 miles from the main university on Malet Street is University Vision Ltd.

…CHEMIST?

Agincourt Trading is 0.20 miles away on Tottenham Court Road.