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You can also use something like DenyHosts. It seems to work pretty well for blocking ssh hacking attempts. :)

http://denyhosts.sourceforge.net/

and one that I think does not fall to Ebert's "games are goal directed" criticisms: Jason Rohrer's "Passage" http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/ I highly recommend it!

Wut?

Here's a neat trick to access the output of commands as file handles:

diff <( echo 'hello') <( echo 'world')

Now that I've got your attention ;) I'll take this opportunity to plug my open source bash libraries:

bash-script-lib, a collection of scripts that let you augment your own scripts with advanced capabilities:

1. "script-input", which lets you create "cat"-like input handling that can accept both forms "my-script filename" and "cat filename | my-script".
2. "script-targets", a framework for creating scripts that accept single or multiple "build-like" targets. You program just the targets; the framework takes care of the rest.
3. "filesystem", a collection of functions for normalizing paths, checking the existence of directories, etc.
4. "backups", a collection of functions for finding files, paths, and latest versions of files from amongst multiple tar files.
5. "display", a collection of functions for tabulating output, converting end-of-line-delimited output into arrays, etc.

bash-sys-manage, a collection of scripts that lets you manage VPS instances by installing components and backing up and restoring discrete aspects of a server. E.g.:

install.sh system.apt system.locale system.users system.nginx nginx.config packages.utils.base packages.utils.build php.package php-fm.build apc.package memcache.package

backup.sh system.users system.config mysql.database

Here's a neat trick to access the output of commands as file handles:

diff <( echo 'hello') <( echo 'world')

Now that I've got your attention ;) I'll take this opportunity to plug my open source bash libraries:

bash-script-lib, a collection of scripts that let you augment your own scripts with advanced capabilities:

1. "script-input", which lets you create "cat"-like input handling that can accept both forms "my-script filename" and "cat filename | my-script".
2. "script-targets", a framework for creating scripts that accept single or multiple "build-like" targets. You program just the targets; the framework takes care of the rest.
3. "filesystem", a collection of functions for normalizing paths, checking the existence of directories, etc.
4. "backups", a collection of functions for finding files, paths, and latest versions of files from amongst multiple tar files.
5. "display", a collection of functions for tabulating output, converting end-of-line-delimited output into arrays, etc.

bash-sys-manage, a collection of scripts that lets you manage VPS instances by installing components and backing up and restoring discrete aspects of a server. E.g.:

install.sh system.apt system.locale system.users system.nginx nginx.config packages.utils.base packages.utils.build php.package php-fm.build apc.package memcache.package

backup.sh system.users system.config mysql.database

I realize this comes down to an old discussion “what is art?” I want to point out a couple of flaws in Mr. Ebert's post but then also point out that there is not a clear and concise answer to my question nor to the challenges posed by Ebert.

“Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.”

To this I disagree, and if I may point to Jason Rohrer’s Passage without getting poo flung at me for choosing something so obvious then I would also comment that this simple game plays like a poem, or like a short film. It uses the decision and direction of the player as part of the changing story that is told and can in fact be experienced many ways, though the end is essentially the same. However and this is key, one must play the game to experience it fully.

This is a fatal flaw in Ebert’s commentary, he is happy to judge games by a little video, maybe a snapshot and some commentary. He would never do this with a movie.

Does it make sense to judge George Melies' "A Voyage to the Moon" (1902) from a single image or a series of images? No, and in fact the proof that it is a work of art is in the exhibition and experience of the whole work.

Games are meant to be played. One cannot judge the quality of a game without playing it. Rather what kind of judgement can one make about a game without playing?

Ebert says, “No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets." This is wrong because I do believe that this assertion has been made. Ebert however will never be able to verify this, as he will never play these games. This is a man who has a great depth of knowledge in a field attempting to extend it and to argue about something of which he knows little or nothing.

Finally I want to comment about the idea of art because so many people are just getting this wrong. The definition of art has changed time and again and will likely continue to do so. The problem is that many people who want to say that something is (or more likely is not) art are just not experts. I am NOT saying that people should stfu or anything like that, but if a work is accepted by the community of artists, historians and museums then it IS art whether we like it or not. There is plenty of art I do not like, but that does not make it less art than the stuff I do like.

To that end WACO Resurrection is a work of art, it was made by artists (Eddo Stern, Peter Brinson, Brody Condon, Michael Wilson, Mark Allen, Jessica Hutchins) and has been exhibited at art venues
INSTALLATION HISTORY: Gamezone Festival, De Singal, Antwerpen, Brussels Slamdance Film Festival, Park City, Utah Ars Electronica, Linz, Austra Australian Center of the Moving Image(ACMI), Melbourne, Australia Grand Arts, Kansas City, MI Next Wave Festival, Melbourne, Australia Rotterdam Film Festival, Rotterdam, Netherlands Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA The Kitchen. New York, NY

and is accepted by the new media arts community and historians as a work of art. http://we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2005/05/so-the-winners.php

If you do not like it that is your prerogative but you are being silly if you claim it is not art. It may not be a masterpiece, but it is by a young group of artists who show a great deal of promise, whose work may eventually fulfill the challenge laid out at the beginning of this post. But these people are artists and not game designers per se. Artists will make art.

Finally I want to say that I think the whole discussion “is this art” is a dead end. I hope to find the time to post again and talk about the influence of Marcel Duchamp on the

The game Passage is art in the form of a game if ever I've seen it. The whole damned thing is one five minute metaphor on life.

How is that not art?

You could also use SigC++ or Boost.Bind, or even std::mem_fun in modern C++...

Augh. I borked that link pretty bad. Should have been as so:

I use Gentoo Linux every day. I use the tools provided in portage daily to do the computer-y things I like to do. I use XFCE for my desktop environment, Firefox (mostly) for web browsing, various text editors, etc. etc... but my favorite tool is the command line. I can do so many more things in a lot less time at the command line than with a GUI - even web browsing (love links).

Anyone notice Linux share the same syntax of UNIX?

Yup.

Do you know how old UNIX is?

Yup. Developed in 1969; making it 41 years old. Linux was developed in 1991.. Linux today is a far cry from Linux back then.

To start Linux even old people like me need to know some history of XENIX, UNIX, SCO, NFS ... some of those things remain unformatted text base, console type (not VT100). GUI is good, but the back is still those things, that why Mac OSX hide them all. Linux need to clean up those history and simplified those things.

I don't know if you are referring to using a Linux distro or programming on the Linux kernel.

I use Gentoo Linux every day. I use the tools provided in portage daily to do the computer-y things I like to do. I use XFCE for my desktop environment, Firefox (mostly) for web browsing, various text editors, etc. etc... but my favorite tool is the command line. I can do so many more things in a lot less time at the command line than with a GUI - even web browsing (love links).

I was born in 1988; 21 years of age. I've been using Linux since 2001 or so.

My fiancee also uses Gentoo Linux, as I got fed up with supporting WinXP and all the junk that accumulated on it. She's been using it fine for the past few years, running a very similar setup to mine. We are the same age.

I don't do any kernel programming, however I do various application- and web-level programming. Never anything past user-space... and that is simply because that is where my interests lay... I've always been more into building programs that do stuff for me, rather than kernel programming / hardware interfacing (at the kernel level).

I reckon we just need to rip the GUI out of VirtualBox and slap it onto KVM. Integrate VDE into it, and it's basically perfect. How hard can it be? A few months work from a few dedicated developers?

That number of 185,000 is VERY SUSPICIOUS. Tucows says that they only have 40,000 software listings. In 2007, Freshmeat.net only listed just over 43,000 projects. Even SourceForge only claims to have 230,000 projects.

I find it very hard to believe that there are 185,000 apps in the App Store. Oh, wait, where did that number from the Wikipedia article actually come from? MacRumors.com. Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha! Now I see why it sounds like bullshit.

It's been done already.

If they're stored using the encryption schemes present in windows, then it doesn't matter how complex your password is - it can still be easily cracked (trivially if lanman is enabled), or you can simply use the hash without cracking it.

If the LM hashes are disabled and the password is greater than about 10 characters long, or if the password is greater than 14 characters long (which disables the LM hash for that account), I am not aware of an easy way to crack them. The Ophcrack tables for NTLM hashes max out at 9 characters (and the character set is restricted for that length), with a table size of 52GB.

Are there tables available for e.g. 14-character passwords stored as an NTLM hash? My back-of-a-napkin calculations put the size of such a thing as being about 20 exabytes (for the same restricted character set as the 9-character Ophcrack table). I'm not an expert in the area though.

Whether that's true depends, to a great degree, on the environment and the threats that you're defending against.

I work in a secure, guarded building and have to swipe a card just to get to my desk. The odds that anyone else will EVER see me type a password are small. If I write down all of my passwords on a piece of paper that's kept in a locked desk drawer, the risk to the organization is minimal. There's no harm in forcing me to have an absurdly long password that's changed often, as I don't NEED to remember it.

On the other hand, a front-desk secretary doesn't have a private space. We need to ensure that his/her password is easy to remember and rarely changed so that the secretary is NEVER tempted to write it down.

(Personally, I use Keyring for PalmOS. You need to have the device and you need to know my keyring password to get anything else.)

Everyone knows that Flash for OSX has sucked in the past (and release version 10 still does). But if you haven't tried the 10.1 Release Candidate, which Adobe has been working the last year to improve these very issues, then you should.

Macromedia definitely shot themselves in the foot with their OSX releases, but now that Adobe is addressing the issue, they won't be given a chance.

As someone who has developed an AIR app https://sourceforge.net/projects/zeeb/
(I use Windows, but got OSX and Linux compatibility with about an hour extra effort), I find it disappointing.

If you see my application, sure it won't win any design awards but it sure is useful...

On the other hand, the top state of the art real-time fully dynamic global illumination is implemented _only_ in an open source engine. Paper & free code for the GI solution: http://graphics.cs.williams.edu/papers/PhotonHPG09/ The engine it's implemented in: http://g3d.sourceforge.net/ One cannot say that closed-source leads the pack across the scape of graphical features. Another example besides this level of RT GI is spherical-blend skinning, which was in open source first as well. I'm sure others can point out other advances that come from the open source world.

I'd skip the gimmicky arduino stuff, and get:

Atmel STK500 link ($80 at digikey)
A handful of AVRs.. a bunch of small cheap ones (atmega48p, attiny45), a few of more expensive ones with a lot of pins (atmega16/164).

AVR-GCC (in repos for most debian based stuff, i'm sure you can get it for all the *nixen though)
WIN-AVR is the windows port link

all GPL.. groovy.

Under windows, STK500 will program with the free "AVR studio" from atmel,
under linux I find avrdude to be the best.

Guess this is all moot though, cause the OP wants to do RF stuff, not microcontrollers. :-)

I use iTALC in most of my labs at my district. And, here is a bonus, it is free. http://italc.sourceforge.net/

As a parent and as also an admin who has to worry that co-workers will act like kids, I have both some experience and some tips in this area. The most important tip is to know your kids and care about them. Train them to be safe and teach them morals. With my kids, I use the motto: Trust but verify.

1. Basic Security: The kids shouldn't have Administrator access, the bios needs a password you don't type in front of them and the boot sequence should be set to boot from hard drive first. They might still get around that security by moving drives around, so you may want tamper evident tape.
2. Command line tools: go ahead and install an ssh server on the windows clients, but do it the easy way with something like sshwindows*. You don't really need it if you enable RPC, but it does come in handy, particularly in combination with unixutils* and Sysinternals*.
3. Remote commands: I use winexe* and enable remote access services on the client machines. You can then run the shutdown command or pretty much any other command remotely. If you have set the boot password as required for startup, shutting the PC down is the same as locking it. I don't really recommend requiring a password for boot if you can avoid it since it is a pain, but if the situation calls for it, it is useful to know that you can. In most cases the bios will let you set a password for modification without requiring one for booting and this is usually much easier to work with, particularly when it comes to automatic updates that reboot.
4. IP tables with static IPs: Since you have admin and they don't, you can set static IPs on the workstations pretty reliably which also allows you to use IP tables effectively to limit or control access.
5. Logs and web control: If you use OpenDNS* and intercept DNS*, then you have pretty decent logs. If you use a transparent squid proxy in combination with strict IP tables rules, you can get really good logs. Beware of SSL proxies and VPNs.

All this comes with a cost of your time and effort. The tools built into the typical router can do a lot of the work for you, but you give up some control. Also, consider your target audience, if your kids are bright teenagers, then they will look at ways around the system. They will almost certainly try to browse by IP or through proxies. If this is a potential issue, then you should also look at setting up a transparent squid proxy and blocking 443 and other ports for addresses not explicitly allowed.

VNC: I didn't list VNC because I don't personally use it at the moment, but I have in the past and it can be a very useful tool. If you use it, I recommend you don't set it to run automatically, but rather start the service when you want to use it with remote commands. In a few cases I've done this so that I could monitor activity without any obvious indication.

• sshwindows*: http://sshwindows.sourceforge.net/ - relatively easy ssh server for windows
• unixutils*: http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ common linux/unix tools for windows, things like grep and wget
• Sysinternals*: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb842062.aspx handy things like pslist and pskill
• winexe*: from http://eol.ovh.org/winexe/
• OpenDNS* and intercept DNS*: see http://www.opendns.com/ and consider something like:
  /sbin/iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -i ${LAN} -p udp --dport 53 -j DNAT --to ${ROUTERinternal}
  /sbin/iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -i ${LAN} -p tcp --dport 53 -j DNAT --to ${ROUTERinternal}

As a parent and as also an admin who has to worry that co-workers will act like kids, I have both some experience and some tips in this area. The most important tip is to know your kids and care about them. Train them to be safe and teach them morals. With my kids, I use the motto: Trust but verify.

1. Basic Security: The kids shouldn't have Administrator access, the bios needs a password you don't type in front of them and the boot sequence should be set to boot from hard drive first. They might still get around that security by moving drives around, so you may want tamper evident tape.
2. Command line tools: go ahead and install an ssh server on the windows clients, but do it the easy way with something like sshwindows*. You don't really need it if you enable RPC, but it does come in handy, particularly in combination with unixutils* and Sysinternals*.
3. Remote commands: I use winexe* and enable remote access services on the client machines. You can then run the shutdown command or pretty much any other command remotely. If you have set the boot password as required for startup, shutting the PC down is the same as locking it. I don't really recommend requiring a password for boot if you can avoid it since it is a pain, but if the situation calls for it, it is useful to know that you can. In most cases the bios will let you set a password for modification without requiring one for booting and this is usually much easier to work with, particularly when it comes to automatic updates that reboot.
4. IP tables with static IPs: Since you have admin and they don't, you can set static IPs on the workstations pretty reliably which also allows you to use IP tables effectively to limit or control access.
5. Logs and web control: If you use OpenDNS* and intercept DNS*, then you have pretty decent logs. If you use a transparent squid proxy in combination with strict IP tables rules, you can get really good logs. Beware of SSL proxies and VPNs.

All this comes with a cost of your time and effort. The tools built into the typical router can do a lot of the work for you, but you give up some control. Also, consider your target audience, if your kids are bright teenagers, then they will look at ways around the system. They will almost certainly try to browse by IP or through proxies. If this is a potential issue, then you should also look at setting up a transparent squid proxy and blocking 443 and other ports for addresses not explicitly allowed.

VNC: I didn't list VNC because I don't personally use it at the moment, but I have in the past and it can be a very useful tool. If you use it, I recommend you don't set it to run automatically, but rather start the service when you want to use it with remote commands. In a few cases I've done this so that I could monitor activity without any obvious indication.

• sshwindows*: http://sshwindows.sourceforge.net/ - relatively easy ssh server for windows
• unixutils*: http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ common linux/unix tools for windows, things like grep and wget
• Sysinternals*: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb842062.aspx handy things like pslist and pskill
• winexe*: from http://eol.ovh.org/winexe/
• OpenDNS* and intercept DNS*: see http://www.opendns.com/ and consider something like:
  /sbin/iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -i ${LAN} -p udp --dport 53 -j DNAT --to ${ROUTERinternal}
  /sbin/iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -i ${LAN} -p tcp --dport 53 -j DNAT --to ${ROUTERinternal}

I have a perl script that just regularly polls my tivo and downloads anything new to my linux box.

I have one word for you: Galleon

I don't think you quite understand what Apple is doing here.

There are essentially two ways for applications to construct the menu: either by adding own items to whatever Cocoa creates automatically (that's official blessed way) or create one from scratch.

So you use Cocoa bindings for whatever language you actually want to use, or you compile from another language into Objective C.

So you still haven't provided a single example of why it must be originally coded in Objective C. By analogy, Google App Engine requires that I use Python or Java, but they certainly don't prevent me from using JRuby.

But Apple with Cocoa (and ObjC - it is the enabler of the magic)

Yeah, clearly Cocoa couldn't work in any other language...

So yeah, your examples don't even preclude this working in other native languages. My problem is that they're effectively saying you cannot use anything which compiles to Objective C, only Objective C itself.

In other words, they're banning third-party preprocessors.

I think a big reason is because the Xiph project has a few other codecs developed in-house that are successful. Besides Vorbis, their MP3 alternative, Speex and and FLAC are "under the Xiph.org banner". This allows them to promote Theora more. Also, Dirac was released in 2008 vs Theora's 2004, so Theora has had 4 more years to get a following.

Java Webstart is also awesome (if your browser works) to try out java programs, e.g. http://jabref.sourceforge.net/

You mean kind of like the Windows Installer, which has come with Windows for the past... uh, DECADE?

The install system that Firefox should have been using from the start, rather than the custom roll-their-own solution that at one point managed to accidentally delete the entire hard drive if you tried to uninstall it?

Yeah, if only there were already open source tools, released by Microsoft themselves, to make such a thing easier...

If only...

Someone's even created ADM templates for you.

Though it's still not as easy as IE is with WSUS, it's not any worse than trying to keep Java, Flash & Acrobat up to date & properly configured.

We may soon need similar lessons here in the UK when we want to access those filtered sites suspected of potentially hosting copyrighted material. Damn, that sounds sad.

Hate to break it to you but most web sites you could ever even think of accessing will be hosting copyrighted material. That's right not just potentially hosting copyrighted material but actually hanging up copyrighted material for anyone to download.

To avoid getting copyrighted material, you'd have to find a country that did not sign the Berne Convention treaty, but even then the material might be under copyright. Alternately, even the countries in the Berne Convention treaty might have material online that has been made Public Domain either because the copyright expire or the rights holder (not the creator) put it into the public domain. Even then you'll have to download (and read) pages of copyrighted information to get at the PD stuff.

Alternately you can just download as much copyrighted material as you want. Try starting from these sites:

• SourceForge
• CreativeCommons
• Linux Kernel Archives
• arXiv
• Ubuntu
• Fedora
• NetBSD
• Oracle
• Sun
• Haiku
• Internet Archive
• and so on

And remember, there's more where that came from.

FYI, tidy itself can do the job; just use

tidy -xml

Failing that, the excellent xmlstarlet is a great tool to have around - it's useful for formatting, querying or even editing XML documents straight from the command line

I love signals and slots. They require a bit of a different way of thinking, and a semi-proprietary compiler

I'm not a C++ programmer and not very familiar with Qt, but is MOC really needed when there's something like this available?

That's useful information to know and it would be worth modding informative if you gave a bit more information to identify the specific devices.

http://kcheck.sourceforge.net/about.html

might be of interest to you which would allow you to build your own kernel and build support for the devices which you say no longer work.

unfortunately sometimes choices get made which are fundamentally annoying thats the cost of free and not being involved in the development process.

Doesn't the ATLAS Project count as prior art for this? It basically compiles the code every possible way, runs it, and compares the results to choose the best algorithm. I believe the traditional use of grad students to achieve trial-and-error optimization also should qualify as prior art.

Nonsense.

There is very little barrier to running whatever OS you want to on your Mac. The fact that the "BIOS" allows for this is not different from the fact that the BIOS on any other PC supports booting up Windows, Linux, FreeBSD or Solaris.

A Mac comes with what you need to get it running something other than MacOS.

That's a bit different from needing to hack the device in some way to achieve this (ipod, appletv).

Although once you hack an AppleTV you will see that it too is pretty much just a PC.

The only reason I don't have more Macs running Linux is that the PC market in general caught up and now the price and feature advantages of a mini aren't there anymore. This will happen with tablets too soon enough. Although the ipad will gain a lot more traction by that time when compared to minis.

It's not really accurate to call Apple a computer company anymore...

I feel stating that if the BIOS supports it, then it's a PC isn't right since my PS3 allows (at the moment) the ability to install another OS (Linux). My PS3 doesn't suddenly become a PC just because I was able to introduce a new OS onto it, it's still a gaming console lacking the ability to add/remove hardware from other sources. I feel it's like stating a Sega Dreamcast is a PC because it can run Linux wihtout needing to bypass a security lock (all the orignal DC's didn't have security checks.). Just because people are able to do these things doesn't mean that the device itself becomes a PC or then just about any device that can read code can pretty much be declared a PC since with the desire and will you can get some OS to run on it. A PC is more then just a device that can run an OS, its beyond what something that isn't a PC can emulate, like declaring a AL program like the Sims is real life since everyone there can eat, sleep, play, work, feel emotions, reproduce just like real life. My 2 cents all in all

DjVu

Apparently the format is in use by hundreds of web sites.

Or perhaps you would prefer Microsoft's XPS format as a PDF replacement.

Hey, I've got a beard almost exactly like that, you insensitive clod!. I'm a Unix admin, the black cord holds my SecureID key, and my tee-shirt looks like that after pulling cables beneath the raised floor.

As for the subject being off-center, haven't you ever heard of the rule of thirds?

An open source project already exists that does just that:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/quickconnect

A few months ago I was working on a PHPmotion site that utilized libcaca and aalib, which both mplayer and vlc use to achieve this effect. I've been stalling on it to work on other, more important projects, but maybe I'll revive it now, since this might become popular...

http://dtris.sourceforge.net/

...

Many points to consider:
-Do you have professional experience programming?
This can be gained through internships, FOSS development, and competitive programming.

Do you have resume fodder?
-Certifications
-Degrees
-Project Successes

Do you have references?
-Professional connections through school.
-People who have reputations in software-development.

Honestly, those are all solid ways to develop the credentials to get you into entry-level, and if you are motivated, well-spoken, and honest, it can be done. But sometimes you have to just bite the bullet and do some intern work for free, or some beta-testing before those connections can be made.

Use tools like FindBugs to root out as much as you can.

Then you have at least shoveled away the bulk of stupid bugs that causes resource leaks and other things that makes a system go obnoxious after a while.

Design bugs are a different kind of animal and those are harder to figure out since they aren't detected by the normal tools.

One word: BackupPC.

Deduplicated backups: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/info.html

IPMI remote management security is worrisome.

There are Linux utilities for IPMI. It's definitely worthwhile running "ipmiutil discover" on any LAN you control, to find out if anything out there speaks IPMI. It's also worthwhile monitoring your data center's networks for anything happening on UDP ports 663 and 664. If you're not using IPMI, make sure no one else is.

A big problem with IPMI is that the shipped hardware defaults really matter. If someone ships you a NIC card with IPMI enabled and the password known, you are 0wned at a very low level. IPMI boards offer various levels of authentication, some of which offer good cryptographic security. But one of the options is "no authentication".

A deeper problem is the possibility that NIC chips might have a default backdoor password built in. Many NIC chips now are designed in China.

Understand how much you can do via IPMI. You can turn the machine on and off remotely. You can force a reboot. You can change the boot settings. You can change the MAC address. You can override the front panel power and reset switches.(!) You can lock out the keyboard, blank the screen, set up a connection which the computer sees as a hard-wired keyboard, and boot from the LAN. The operating system isn't involved in any of this; it's taking place at a level below that of the main CPU.

Dell's guidance on IPMI is terrifying. See Figure 3, where IPMI over LAN is being enabled with username "root", no password. This sort of thing is common. The default password on Dell PowerEdge servers is "calvin", on Sun Fire servers its "changeme", in both cases the user is "root"."

If you try to do it right, turning on all the crypto and using unique random keys for each chassis, someone has to manually type in the encryption key in hex on each new server. Then you need a remote management program which securely holds all the keys. How many shops really do that?

even staying with Evil H.264, the video-tag/HTML5 is still a huge moral win over Evil Proprietary Flash.

I agree that using the video tag would be preferable to using Flash, at least for just an online movie player (ala YouTube), but I largely believe in taking a multi-pronged approach here.

First, there's a huge quantity of Flash content out there and people developing using Flash. Free Software enthusiasts can't even play that stuff unless they have some kind of tool, and that's why stuff like Gnash and Lightspark must be important parts of our overall roadmap.

For web video we need to start pushing the video tag in conjunction with free formats. Ogg Theora is one possibility, trying to get Google to open the vp8 codec for YouTube is another. I think that there's still a hope (small, but possible) to get widespread support for Ogg Theora alongside widespread support for H.264.

And of course there's the software patent front: We need to chug forward and get the courts (or legislature, if necessary) to get rid of software patents once and for all. Getting rid of software patents would make codec support possible for thing such as H.264, mp3, Sorenson Spark, and vp6, and would remove the threat of shakedowns from companies like Microsoft for things like the FAT patents.

We need to push forward on all of these fronts if we want to make real progress towards our twin goals of free and open formats on the web and the ability for FOSS browsers to implement all relevant technologies without fear of patent litigation.

I really like the guys who opened up their brand new high-end Samsung flat-panel TVs, they're called SammyGO.

The difference between your computer and your hammer is that you don't get the information that influences your vote through your hammer. That could be important.

I'd nix the VNC and go with Synergy. I use it between my Linux based DVR and my laptop when I want to used both. Works with Windows and between Windows and Linux

See John Holt's books here (he was a long time school teacher):
http://www.holtgws.com/

NYS Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto says the whole point of schooling is to dumb most people down:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
"Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And in later years it became the training shaken loose from even its own original logic -- to regulate the poor; since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling just exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to where it began to seize the sons and daughters of the middle classes."

The whole point of those early lessons is to waste kids' time and dumb them down. As Gatto says elsewhere, it was all worked out in public to create and industrial utopia and powerful nation-states with strong armies. He calls it a "conspiracy against ourselves":
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"A huge price had to be paid for business and government efficiency, a price we still pay in the quality of our existence. Part of what kids gave up was the prospect of being able to read very well, a historic part of the American genius. Instead, school had to train them for their role in the new overarching social system. But spare yourself the agony of thinking of this as a conspiracy. It was and is a fully rational transaction, the very epitome of rationalization engendered by a group of honorable men, all honorable men--but with decisive help from ordinary citizens, from almost all of us as we gradually lost touch with the fact that being followers instead of leaders, becoming consumers in place of producers, rendered us incompletely human. It was a naturally occurring conspiracy, one which required no criminal genius. The real conspirators were ourselves. When we sold our liberty for the promise of automatic security, we became like children in a conspiracy against growing up, sad children who conspire against their own children, consigning them over and over to the denaturing vats of compulsory state factory schooling."

With the internet, we could have "learning on demand", not "learning just in case". My essay on that:
"Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools"
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
"""
Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand.
Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change. ... So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the

Another option is G'MIC and it's inpaint feature (unfortunately the algorithm is not able to reconstruct textures).

HDD's are heavier and more fragile then LTO 4 tapes, also more vulnerable to static.

So not as portable, I know, but nonetheless portable. I have an external hard drive which sat in my backpack for several months, and I carried that backpack everywhere -- the drive is still good.

(we are talking about your entire business if your office burns down, you need to take care).

Yes, that's true, but it's also something you'd presumably be monitoring. The idea of a backup is to have at least two copies, so that if one copy fails, you can reconstruct from the other. If the "portable" hard drives fail, you buy a new one and copy the data from the original source -- the live system.

hosting is cheap.

For 6 TB?

Depends how you do it. With a colo, I imagine it would be -- just make sure it fits in the box.

You assert that tapes require a enterprise level service to be properly stored (well actually it can be done for A$20 a week for a fireproof lock box).

I suppose I'm making assumptions about the physical size of the tapes, and the need to have them organized.

I'm not assuming "enterprise-level" -- those are your words, not mine. I'm factoring the labor of actually physically carrying the tapes and storing them, even if it is one person carrying them to a lock box.

Then you blatantly state that enterprise level hardware for your scenario is overkill.

For the drives? Yes. You'd want to put them in some rented corner of an enterprise-level datacenter, but you don't necessarily need enterprise-level disks and controllers, even to move a terabyte (or six) a week.

Linux is free. So is Solaris, for that matter.

My time however is not. Compared to my time a Windows license is almost free.

Irrelevant, unless you're claiming it's going to necessarily take less of your time to do it with Windows.

A$2000 for a box, with controller and 1 disk. Add another A$150 per 1.5 TB disk. Unless your suggesting we should use the receptionists machine as a backup system. This is where your system becomes highly unreliable. Not enterprise ready at all.

"Enterprise-ready" is a bit of a buzzword. Google runs largely on consumer hardware. I'm not suggesting you literally take the receptionist's machine...

And even with the exchange rate, sorry, 1.5 TB is not A$150. Try more like $110. Not "enterprise-ready", you say? That's another reason to use something like Solaris and ZFS -- it doesn't have to be. Even RAID stands for "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks."

Here is the problem, you're treating your backups as a hot system, not a cold system.

I'm not sure what you mean by that.

I've lost count of how many times someone has asked me for a file they deleted off the server months ago

So use hard disks and something like... oh... last time I set anything like this up, I used BackupPC. At this point, though, even a straight copy would benefit from block-level dedup. Either way, the result is that you can store many versions -- daily backups for a week, weekly backups for a month, monthly backups for a year...

If they deleted it off the server months ago, there's probably a version of it somewhere. Maybe not the most recent version, but a version.

do you intend to keep adding disks to this array?

Possibly, but that's not required by the above. If it were (assuming your massive numbers of changes), there's always the possibility of taking a snapshot of the system to a disk or five (using something simple, like a tarball split across those disks) and unplug those disks for awhile.

Further more, your ide