Best Buy should be charged criminally with refusing to accept legal US currency
Bzzt. Wrong. Best buy could decide that they only want to accept Quarters minted in 1994 and it would be legal for them to do so, though it probably would drive them out of business. If Best Buy had told the man that they would not accept his $2 bills, it would be within their right.
I am not defending their actions in this circumstance, since they certainly were wrong, but it is a very common misunderstanding that because money is marked "Legal Tender for All Debts Public and Private" that someone has to accept it as payment. The laws governing currency are very specific on this point, and were partly designed to prevent just the sort of thing this guy was doing. Similarly, many people are often suprised and upset when their attempt to pay for large traffic fines with pennies are met with a refusal after they have so cleverly lugged 50lbs of change down to the courthouse.
Also, did the fellow not realize that if he had wanted to pay the installation fee using only $1 bills instead of $2's that it would have given the cashier TWICE as much work to do? Maybe he should have just tried to pay in pennies like everyone else who thinks that doing this kind of thing actually makes the store/government/etc sorry for taking his money.
I understand shipping and "handling" charges, but if you have checked eBay recently you'd know it's truly out of hand.
You are telling me that it's OK for a seller to charge me $75 to ship some modestly priced item (retails for about 90 bucks, weighs about 10lbs) WITHIN THE SAME STATE? Seriously, they could afford to give me a discount because they are going to save a ton of money in the ACTUAL shipping price if I buy the item versus someone else in the US who is 2000 miles away and still pays the same "flat rate shipping".
ebay desperately needs to curb the shipping problem and the problem of sellers making so many listings for the same item. The ebay homepage looks like my spam folder most of the time. It's a wonder there are so many stupid people out there buying enough of that crap to keep idiot sellers in business.
If you are one of these sellers who does this kind of thing and is just posting here anonymously to protect your identity, I'd suggest you rethink your positions. I'm not the only person who hates you. Your business will eventually suffer because you cannot be forthright.
I was going to suggest these two tools also. They are specifically designed for what you want to do. I use CPU burn exclusively to test cooling performance in new white box server setups; it is particularly useful in conjunction with lmsensors to determine optimum cooling.
The utility is designed to run instruction loops which require the most POWER CONSUMPTION from the cpu and thus generate the most heat. There are versions tuned from pentiums up to current CPU's. There is also a version designed to cause your ram to use the maximum amount of power it can.
Unlike running any old utility that gives you "100% cpu load" such as the comments about running 'true' in an endless loop presented in this thread, cpuburn is actually targeted at generating heat, power, and system stress. 100% processor utalization does not necessarily mean that you are stressing a computer.
Unsuprisingly, many times cpuburn will often cause a computer that you believe is fine and works properly 100% of the time to hard lock after only a couple of minutes. Over time, dust builds up; fans get slower and give out, etc. and a computer with an adequate cooling solution a year ago may not be able to take the heat anymore. CPUBurn can reveal that. It is a very very good utility.
This dude should have kept a low profile from the start. He has been ripping of OSS Projects for years. CherryOS is only his latest victim. MXS has already pulled PDF Creator after it was shown to be a total ripoff of opensource, and their "flagship product" the VX30 java/web/video/whatever thing rips code from the following projects according to an analasys by 'eventhorizon' on the pearpc.net boards. These packages were all found by examining text strings, so there likely could be many more libraries, etc. that the strings have been stripped from.
XviD MplayerC (windows gui frontend) FileDropListCtrl (no credit was given) DEFLATE code Inflate code JOrbis LAME
Arben et al are lately trying to hide the stolen code by packing the executables via UPX or some similar or slightly modified PE compressor, so the analasys is being done on memory dumps of the binaries after decompression.
Their VX30 products are priced from $1,000 up. Oddly enough, the VX30 product actually seems to work pretty well. At least in this particular case, it's a shame that with little more effort and perhaps the choice of a couple different libraries and methods of writing their application that could have legally produced and sold this product... at least until people find more stolen code in it:)
This really bugs me and I have flat out flamed sellers for it when I ask them about some reasonable shipping (if I am in the same state or something) and they "explain" to me about avoiding the FVF. The final value fees they are "saving" almost always amount to about $3.00, yet they happily run 15 or so concurrent listings, buying "premium" features such as the gallery view and whatnot that cost them a hell of a lot more than $3.00.
Some people are just dumb as bricks, I guess. Personally, I think eBay ought to charge final value fee on ANYTHING above an actual calculated shipping charge.
Ditto; I never got headaches from it. I liked it a lot. I still have a virtual boy in storage or boxed away somewhere. I ought to pick up the full compliment of games that came out for it; I bet I could get them all for only a couple bucks. If I found it tomorrow, I'd play me some red alert like nobody's business.
By terms of our license, whatever you build upon our code must be released to the public, so that we all may benefit from your better code, and you can't just horde away your own special upgrades, and sell it out.
Well while the end result -- that they must offer up the source code publiclly -- is probably true, the reason is not. If you write code for PearPC and license it under the GPL, you really ought to understand your license better than this. If you don't like it, you should use a different license.
If indeed CherryOS were to start selling their product, they would be obligated to provide source code to their customers who purchase the product; however, they are required by the GPL to provide source to anyone who receives their product, so if they ever offered up a demo version publiclly, then they'd be obligated to provide the source code to whoever received the demo. Note also that they are even allowed to charge a nominal fee for the transfer of the source copy. Since they have, at one time or another either sold the product or given it away, they are obliged to release the source code on request from the parties who received the software.
This is an interesting sort of 'loophole' in the GPL (v2) that has been discussed here and elsewhere many times. Maui X stream, if they actually had any technical capability, could beef up PearPC to monumental proportions, make it run at 200% host speed, etc. and never have to release any source code at all if they never sold or gave away their product.
So, the end result is that if you gave MXS $50 and got a binary of cherryos, and cherryos is derived from the GPL PearPC, then you are indeed entitled to source. Go get it, then feel free to make it available publiclly; please!
Negative; there is a lot of misinformation out there regarding 911 testing. Some city governments or police departments if you ask them will even erroneously tell you that you cannot call to test your 911 service. This is completely false. You should test your 911 service when you move, change phone companies, get a new telephone number, port a telephone number, or add a new telephone line. You should probably not need to test 911 from your cellular phone though, unless you cannot get a straight answer from your provider as to whether or not your area is equipped with e911 or has to rely on old-style tower locating (it's nice to know either way)
You can call 911 to test your 911 service. Depending on your provider, county, or state you must either call the dispatch center first to inform them you are making a test call AND/OR you must call 911 and immediately inform them that you are calling to confirm your service and ask them to verify your location information.
The "full-on" LTSP can give you X, NX, and VNC exportable desktops (or an individual application if you configure the sessions that way) plus PXE booting for full terminals if you need it. That gives you a lot of flexibility on the client as you can use the NX client or a VNC client if an NX client is not available or a little dedicated terminal with only a cpu, ram, and motherboard. I'm also sure that you are aware that the dedicated X VNC server is also quite a bit faster than the normal experience of running a VNC server on Windows or x0rfbserver under linux as the graphical changes are all translated to VNC commands directly and do not have to be polled. It should be very fast with java and swig if your apps widgets are not too complicated, so it's not an impossible solution, at least if you want to provide access via a java applet.
Anyway, FreeNX is what you actually want to fool with. Deb's here (or they used to be here anyway):
deb http://www.freedesktop.org/~mornfall/debian/ experimental main
You in theory can configure x0rfbserver on top of the FreeNX X server too, so you could have a user log off of an NX session, then access it later over VNC or standard X or whatever.
It's not a problem, it's made to do that on purpose. Many other POS systems are similar and require cashier intervention and sometimes a manager to run a debit card through as a credit card.
The reason? Simple. Debit card purchases cost the store less money than credit card purchases -- and if a debit card purchase is run through as credidt, the store will pay the same fees they pay on credit cards (usually a percentage of the gross sale price.) Stores are also allowed to pass foreign ATM fees to the card holder to cover their costs (or profit) also, though few do unless you opt for "cash back" in addition to your purchase. This is also incentive for them to force a card to run as a debit.
Apple is no stranger to the 'market way before you ship' either. Although they don't typically wait YEARS before actually shipping a product they are hyping, The F5 and 17" Powerbook were among the worst offenders in recent years. Some apple stores did not even get a 17" Powerbook until a couple of months after the announcement.
OTOH we have been hearing about Nano-ITX for TWO years now and VIA is still not shipping.
In the fall of 2001, after John left, CERN issued a press release...
Not sure if the actual statement from him said that they would do it within a year or they would "make an announcement pertaining to this" but if it's indeed the latter, I'd say the "prediction" was satisfied for whatever that is worth. Now it's (possibly) been done, so I guess you could also say that CERN's "prediction" happened also.
Seems Titor's technique was to pick up on some things that were just coming into the fringe of the public eye but not really making significant news yet and then make a prediction that just basically said "this will be a big deal in a few years". Although this is not terribly hard to do, the fellow did it very well and has hitherto been pretty lucky about his choices.
A Titor of today would probably choose to make sweeping predictions regarding the economic growth of China and the looming energy crisis it will cause. He might make some bold declaration about nuclear power coming back into vogue
Some of his statements were a little too bold and forward looking, though. Tthe US goes into civil war this year according to Titor; however, historically the US political system has survived many tragedies larger than an economic slump or bad apples in power. He also had said that medicine takes a big step backwards and medical advancement slows, which is also historically highly unlikely. If there is all this crisis going on, then historically, medical advancement INCREASES during times of long crisis. Perhaps Titor did not do enough study of history before making some of his predictions. Unfortunately for him, the few bold and horribly wrong predictions will probably collapse the credibility of the hoax. Other than that, it might have been a pretty good one.
What a ridiculous question! If doctors simply never told anyone about a problem if it was currently "incurable," what kind of medical advancements could anyone ever make?
-- Being able to positively identify the plaques while a person is alive is instrumental to being able to determine the effectiveness of any proposed treatment in a timely manner. A patient could have symptoms of Alzheimers and participate in a treatment study -- if the symptoms miraculously dissapear, there would not be any way to positively determine if the treatment itself helped, or even if Alzheimers was the cause of the symptoms in the first place -- at least not until many years later when an autopsy might happen to confirm an earlier diagnosis.
I have not read the specifications, but it would, of course, be possible to scale the host CPU without scaling the memory clock. There is also the question of how much power savings you forego by not downclocking the external memory controller of a Pentium M even though you don't always need its full abilities either. It's yet another case of six-of-one/half-a-dozen-of-the-other. I'm not really getting the point of the original article... The chips have different power specs; I don't see what the big deal with the benchmarks is...
My desktop has a 400W power supply, but it's powered OFF most of the time! According to the UPS, the entire system (two flat panels, scanner, etc.) uses 246W at idle, but if I run up the CPU with cpuburn it uses 282W. This is without making the HDD's or monitors go nuts, which would also spike power consumption considerably more. The point is, as you said, that power consumption based on a published maximum spec is a poor reason to cry foul.
I happen to think that it would be very nice if laptop reviews could create a new metric to benchmark systems with -- pick whatever your benchmark suite you want to create some kind of system performance score, then factor in: 1)the total amount of power the machine consumed to achieve the score 2)the power consumed while the machine is idle and 3)the capacity of the battery and/or the weight of the machine. If users had such a metric, it would be a pretty good way to compare the various offerings between vendors (and even platforms too for that matter) after deciding on certain necessary features such as size of screen, amount of ram, speed of hard disk, etc.
Uh no. The original beta videos at stores were in fact, edited for length to fit on the tape -- which you probably would have known if you'd rented one back then and watched it in a beta machine. What I meant by customers could not record on them was that customers could not record a whole show on them (unless they hit the button at exactly the right time and the program did not run long by even a second).
Later, this problem was somewhat remedied by longer beta tapes, but it was already too late for Beta.
And I am old enough that I own not one, but two consumer betamax decks. I am happy that the old home movies were filmed on Beta instead of VHS since they are much higher quality.
I have been making this argument for a long time; however, it does appear that BluRay is a superior format for a lot of reasons. I am not sure that anything like the Beta/VHS war would actually happen today anyway. That one was mainly fought over the limitations of the technology. Beta lost because the tapes were short, people could not record on them, and studios could not release an entire movie on them.
The BluRay and HDDVD war will be fought over how much money it costs studios to pump out titles in either format. From what I understand, the HD-DVD workflow and format on the disc work pretty much the same as DVD, meaning that a lot of the processes to get to a finished disc are going to be the same as DVD meaning less new software to buy, and less productivity lost due to changing the way a shop works.
Plus, as you said, it has the "DVD" name that people (including the people making the decision as to what format to release the movies in) has a good amount of sway. I think the way they should have done it is to have the two camps fight it out and then the "winner" get to use the HD-DVD mark.
Either that or blu-ray should just change its name to HD+DVD; HAHA!
It's not the best idea, but it's common practice. It probably helps more than it hurts. When you've got thousands of chroot jails set up maintaining them without hardlinks is not only tedious, it takes a non-trivial amount of disk space -- especially if you need users to have access to a decent set of commands and libraries.
If you can gain access to trojan the binaries in a jail, hardlinks or not, you will more than likely have enough access to break out of the jail anyway using many other methods (ptrace, kernel memory attack, mknod, etc.)
Of course there are various techniques and security patches and whatnot that can limit even what a superuser can do in a chroot jail that can eliminate both problems described, but if you are getting into this level of security, either you don't need to discuss it because you already know how to do it, or the discussion probably belongs somewhere other than slashdot.
I think you may be confusing an application presenting limited access to a user vs the application itself actually having limited access.
Chroot can be used to do either; however the implemetations are wildly different. The former can often be accomplished by an application forking a child process to handle a connection and calling a chroot before accepting the connection. The user will have a subset of the system files to access, but an exploit launched against the server process itself could give an attacker more widespread access.
The second involves running the server process itslef inside of a chroot jail such that the actual application (say an ftp server) cannot access anything but files necessary to do its job, even running as superuser, even if attacked with an exploit.
It sounds to me like you actually want to do the former (or both), but are actually doing only the latter.
You should create a chroot jail containing the sshd, sftp, and rssh binaries, everything necessary to run those binaries, and everything necessary to authenticate your users (and only your users -- leave out root and all those funky system accounts!). This jail should also contain the users data directories.
Secondly, you want to set up sftp (when called by sshd and restricted to sftp-only by rssh) to do a chroot onto a users home directory whenever a connection by that user comes in. Alternatively, you can set up sshd to run the called command in a chroot. Patches for openssh or sftp are both available.
As I'm sure you know, chroot is not necessarily a simple feature due to the fact that if you need a full environment to use commands (which aside from forwarding ports is the only thing ssh actually lets you do -- even sftp has a "server" command that gets run by the sftp client), so you can't just automatically have sshd know what library files and binaries are necessary for a user to have certain access.
What you ought to do instead is set up your users with ssh using rssh as a shell. rssh can give you a restricted environment without necessarily having to chroot (if you trust rssh, anyway), but if you really want to deal with the setup and maintenance overhead of a real chroot environment for a shell, rssh can do that too -- every user can have their own jail or they can share a jail and you can use permissions to restrict them.
I can't understand if this is your intent or you'd like sshd to run in a jail -- if that is the case, it's definately not a simple 'switch it on' feature either. The same rules apply except that your user accounts will be futher restricted to the root that sshd is running in. For the ultra paranoid you could jail sshd in/home, say, and then jail each user account in/home/user/ with only access to sash, busybox or some similar staticlly compiled multi-command utility.
Remember, use hardlinks on all your bins and libs in your chroot jails otherwise you'll forget to update the files!
LED's are considerably more power/cost efficient than both flourescent and incandescent; however they are considerably more expensive also. The best balance comes from flourescent.
The linked bulb also is 12V only.. You'd have to convert your electrical wiring or fixtures to DC to use it in a home anyway and it's probably equivalent to about a 15W bulb. There are some real LED edison-base fixtures, but this is not one. I believe this kind of bulb is most suited to use in RV's and the like where you really need to think about power a lot more than in a regular on-the-grid house.
Many of the better quality/newer CF bulbs do not have the same "warm up" problems as older or cheaper bulbs. In particular the newer sylvania bulbs have the delay but start up at about 85-90% lumen output. Philips Gen IV bulbs do very well both for the delay and the warmup. They are as good as it gets, but they are also expensive.
The main problem with CF is that a good ballast (a good electroniclly controlled ballast can prevent both the startup delay and the warmup) is expensive. There are CF makers who sell a "bulb" that has the ballast seperated from the tube. While a complete fixture from them is about six bucks, replacement tubes are only a dollar or two.
An easy way to tell if you are effectively saving energy with your computer (or other consumer electronics) is to see if the case of the computer or monitor is warm when it hasn't been in use for a few hours (such as when you come home from work or when you get up in the morning). If the back or top of the case are warm to the touch, then the device has been burning power recently.
WTF are computers cars? This suggestion is junk - its totally dependent on how a computer or other device behaves when idle and how the particular system dissapates heat. If you really want to tell how much power your computer uses, then meter it. You can buy a plug-in meter that will tell you exactly how much power something is using for about $30. You can also log the amount of power consumed if you use a smart UPS.
It's also worth noting that configuring agressive power saving options on your system will probalby involve spinning the HDD down anyway pretty much nullifying the argument against shutting the system down helping hard drive failure.
The biggest ways to save power on a computer are:
- Switch to LCD monitors. - Use DPMS to sleep your monitor instead of using a screensaver. - Configure your computer to suspend/hibernate after a period of time. Use suspend+wake on lan if you need remote access to your home computer, say, from work. - Buy energy efficient processors. Intel is coming out with Pentium-M's for the desktop now. There's also VIA's C3's which are very lightweight power consumers considering power/performance anyway.
You also ought to buy a good quality power supply because it will provide cleaner power during power on/off and in general make your components last longer. It will probably also do better in standby mode when it has to provide a decent amount of power without fans cooling it and stuff.
Another recommendation is to purchase a BitsLimited Smartstrip power strip. You can use either a monitor or your computer on the control outlet to automatically switch task lighting on and off with either the system power or the screensaver. It's pretty neat to go up to your computer when the screen is blanked, move the mouse, and have the whole desk light up. If you walk away for 20 minutes, your lights and everything will automatically shut off when your monitor blanks.
Cox is a phone company actually. They sell Cox Digital Telephone -- a voip service that piggybacks on the internet service. Whether or not the FCC can regulate the VoIP part remains in question; however they sure have regulatory control of the CLEC's Cox operates. I think that they could certainly get away with fining any ISP who's a CLEC (most are these days anyway -- even some very small ones).
The question gets harder though when you get your internet service, say, as part of an office lease or something. If your office building wants to block VoIP they probalby could get away with it.
If you have AC that's so bad it destroys power supplies and you own your home, you should seriously consider some decent power conditioners. They cost a few hundred bucks but can seriously help your power on the whole house.
Slashdot Mirror
Best Buy should be charged criminally with refusing to accept legal US currency
Bzzt. Wrong. Best buy could decide that they only want to accept Quarters minted in 1994 and it would be legal for them to do so, though it probably would drive them out of business. If Best Buy had told the man that they would not accept his $2 bills, it would be within their right.
I am not defending their actions in this circumstance, since they certainly were wrong, but it is a very common misunderstanding that because money is marked "Legal Tender for All Debts Public and Private" that someone has to accept it as payment. The laws governing currency are very specific on this point, and were partly designed to prevent just the sort of thing this guy was doing. Similarly, many people are often suprised and upset when their attempt to pay for large traffic fines with pennies are met with a refusal after they have so cleverly lugged 50lbs of change down to the courthouse.
Also, did the fellow not realize that if he had wanted to pay the installation fee using only $1 bills instead of $2's that it would have given the cashier TWICE as much work to do? Maybe he should have just tried to pay in pennies like everyone else who thinks that doing this kind of thing actually makes the store/government/etc sorry for taking his money.
I understand shipping and "handling" charges, but if you have checked eBay recently you'd know it's truly out of hand.
You are telling me that it's OK for a seller to charge me $75 to ship some modestly priced item (retails for about 90 bucks, weighs about 10lbs) WITHIN THE SAME STATE? Seriously, they could afford to give me a discount because they are going to save a ton of money in the ACTUAL shipping price if I buy the item versus someone else in the US who is 2000 miles away and still pays the same "flat rate shipping".
ebay desperately needs to curb the shipping problem and the problem of sellers making so many listings for the same item. The ebay homepage looks like my spam folder most of the time. It's a wonder there are so many stupid people out there buying enough of that crap to keep idiot sellers in business.
If you are one of these sellers who does this kind of thing and is just posting here anonymously to protect your identity, I'd suggest you rethink your positions. I'm not the only person who hates you. Your business will eventually suffer because you cannot be forthright.
I was going to suggest these two tools also. They are specifically designed for what you want to do. I use CPU burn exclusively to test cooling performance in new white box server setups; it is particularly useful in conjunction with lmsensors to determine optimum cooling.
The utility is designed to run instruction loops which require the most POWER CONSUMPTION from the cpu and thus generate the most heat. There are versions tuned from pentiums up to current CPU's. There is also a version designed to cause your ram to use the maximum amount of power it can.
Unlike running any old utility that gives you "100% cpu load" such as the comments about running 'true' in an endless loop presented in this thread, cpuburn is actually targeted at generating heat, power, and system stress. 100% processor utalization does not necessarily mean that you are stressing a computer.
Unsuprisingly, many times cpuburn will often cause a computer that you believe is fine and works properly 100% of the time to hard lock after only a couple of minutes. Over time, dust builds up; fans get slower and give out, etc. and a computer with an adequate cooling solution a year ago may not be able to take the heat anymore. CPUBurn can reveal that. It is a very very good utility.
This dude should have kept a low profile from the start. He has been ripping of OSS Projects for years. CherryOS is only his latest victim. MXS has already pulled PDF Creator after it was shown to be a total ripoff of opensource, and their "flagship product" the VX30 java/web/video/whatever thing rips code from the following projects according to an analasys by 'eventhorizon' on the pearpc.net boards. These packages were all found by examining text strings, so there likely could be many more libraries, etc. that the strings have been stripped from.
:)
XviD
MplayerC (windows gui frontend)
FileDropListCtrl (no credit was given)
DEFLATE code
Inflate code
JOrbis
LAME
Arben et al are lately trying to hide the stolen code by packing the executables via UPX or some similar or slightly modified PE compressor, so the analasys is being done on memory dumps of the binaries after decompression.
Their VX30 products are priced from $1,000 up. Oddly enough, the VX30 product actually seems to work pretty well. At least in this particular case, it's a shame that with little more effort and perhaps the choice of a couple different libraries and methods of writing their application that could have legally produced and sold this product... at least until people find more stolen code in it
This really bugs me and I have flat out flamed sellers for it when I ask them about some reasonable shipping (if I am in the same state or something) and they "explain" to me about avoiding the FVF. The final value fees they are "saving" almost always amount to about $3.00, yet they happily run 15 or so concurrent listings, buying "premium" features such as the gallery view and whatnot that cost them a hell of a lot more than $3.00.
Some people are just dumb as bricks, I guess. Personally, I think eBay ought to charge final value fee on ANYTHING above an actual calculated shipping charge.
Ditto; I never got headaches from it. I liked it a lot. I still have a virtual boy in storage or boxed away somewhere. I ought to pick up the full compliment of games that came out for it; I bet I could get them all for only a couple bucks. If I found it tomorrow, I'd play me some red alert like nobody's business.
By terms of our license, whatever you build upon our code must be released to the public, so that we all may benefit from your better code, and you can't just horde away your own special upgrades, and sell it out.
Well while the end result -- that they must offer up the source code publiclly -- is probably true, the reason is not. If you write code for PearPC and license it under the GPL, you really ought to understand your license better than this. If you don't like it, you should use a different license.
If indeed CherryOS were to start selling their product, they would be obligated to provide source code to their customers who purchase the product; however, they are required by the GPL to provide source to anyone who receives their product, so if they ever offered up a demo version publiclly, then they'd be obligated to provide the source code to whoever received the demo. Note also that they are even allowed to charge a nominal fee for the transfer of the source copy. Since they have, at one time or another either sold the product or given it away, they are obliged to release the source code on request from the parties who received the software.
This is an interesting sort of 'loophole' in the GPL (v2) that has been discussed here and elsewhere many times. Maui X stream, if they actually had any technical capability, could beef up PearPC to monumental proportions, make it run at 200% host speed, etc. and never have to release any source code at all if they never sold or gave away their product.
So, the end result is that if you gave MXS $50 and got a binary of cherryos, and cherryos is derived from the GPL PearPC, then you are indeed entitled to source. Go get it, then feel free to make it available publiclly; please!
Negative; there is a lot of misinformation out there regarding 911 testing. Some city governments or police departments if you ask them will even erroneously tell you that you cannot call to test your 911 service. This is completely false. You should test your 911 service when you move, change phone companies, get a new telephone number, port a telephone number, or add a new telephone line. You should probably not need to test 911 from your cellular phone though, unless you cannot get a straight answer from your provider as to whether or not your area is equipped with e911 or has to rely on old-style tower locating (it's nice to know either way)
You can call 911 to test your 911 service. Depending on your provider, county, or state you must either call the dispatch center first to inform them you are making a test call AND/OR you must call 911 and immediately inform them that you are calling to confirm your service and ask them to verify your location information.
The "full-on" LTSP can give you X, NX, and VNC exportable desktops (or an individual application if you configure the sessions that way) plus PXE booting for full terminals if you need it. That gives you a lot of flexibility on the client as you can use the NX client or a VNC client if an NX client is not available or a little dedicated terminal with only a cpu, ram, and motherboard. I'm also sure that you are aware that the dedicated X VNC server is also quite a bit faster than the normal experience of running a VNC server on Windows or x0rfbserver under linux as the graphical changes are all translated to VNC commands directly and do not have to be polled. It should be very fast with java and swig if your apps widgets are not too complicated, so it's not an impossible solution, at least if you want to provide access via a java applet.
Anyway, FreeNX is what you actually want to fool with. Deb's here (or they used to be here anyway):
deb http://www.freedesktop.org/~mornfall/debian/ experimental main
You in theory can configure x0rfbserver on top of the FreeNX X server too, so you could have a user log off of an NX session, then access it later over VNC or standard X or whatever.
It's not a problem, it's made to do that on purpose. Many other POS systems are similar and require cashier intervention and sometimes a manager to run a debit card through as a credit card.
The reason? Simple. Debit card purchases cost the store less money than credit card purchases -- and if a debit card purchase is run through as credidt, the store will pay the same fees they pay on credit cards (usually a percentage of the gross sale price.) Stores are also allowed to pass foreign ATM fees to the card holder to cover their costs (or profit) also, though few do unless you opt for "cash back" in addition to your purchase. This is also incentive for them to force a card to run as a debit.
Apple is no stranger to the 'market way before you ship' either. Although they don't typically wait YEARS before actually shipping a product they are hyping, The F5 and 17" Powerbook were among the worst offenders in recent years. Some apple stores did not even get a 17" Powerbook until a couple of months after the announcement.
OTOH we have been hearing about Nano-ITX for TWO years now and VIA is still not shipping.
Looks like he was a bit early, though.
In the fall of 2001, after John left, CERN issued a press release...
Not sure if the actual statement from him said that they would do it within a year or they would "make an announcement pertaining to this" but if it's indeed the latter, I'd say the "prediction" was satisfied for whatever that is worth. Now it's (possibly) been done, so I guess you could also say that CERN's "prediction" happened also.
Seems Titor's technique was to pick up on some things that were just coming into the fringe of the public eye but not really making significant news yet and then make a prediction that just basically said "this will be a big deal in a few years". Although this is not terribly hard to do, the fellow did it very well and has hitherto been pretty lucky about his choices.
A Titor of today would probably choose to make sweeping predictions regarding the economic growth of China and the looming energy crisis it will cause. He might make some bold declaration about nuclear power coming back into vogue
Some of his statements were a little too bold and forward looking, though. Tthe US goes into civil war this year according to Titor; however, historically the US political system has survived many tragedies larger than an economic slump or bad apples in power. He also had said that medicine takes a big step backwards and medical advancement slows, which is also historically highly unlikely. If there is all this crisis going on, then historically, medical advancement INCREASES during times of long crisis. Perhaps Titor did not do enough study of history before making some of his predictions. Unfortunately for him, the few bold and horribly wrong predictions will probably collapse the credibility of the hoax. Other than that, it might have been a pretty good one.
Depending on how much cash you are actually willing to shell out, you could also fund QEMU and get the virtualization module open-sourced!
What a ridiculous question! If doctors simply never told anyone about a problem if it was currently "incurable," what kind of medical advancements could anyone ever make?
-- Being able to positively identify the plaques while a person is alive is instrumental to being able to determine the effectiveness of any proposed treatment in a timely manner. A patient could have symptoms of Alzheimers and participate in a treatment study -- if the symptoms miraculously dissapear, there would not be any way to positively determine if the treatment itself helped, or even if Alzheimers was the cause of the symptoms in the first place -- at least not until many years later when an autopsy might happen to confirm an earlier diagnosis.
I have not read the specifications, but it would, of course, be possible to scale the host CPU without scaling the memory clock. There is also the question of how much power savings you forego by not downclocking the external memory controller of a Pentium M even though you don't always need its full abilities either. It's yet another case of six-of-one/half-a-dozen-of-the-other. I'm not really getting the point of the original article... The chips have different power specs; I don't see what the big deal with the benchmarks is...
My desktop has a 400W power supply, but it's powered OFF most of the time! According to the UPS, the entire system (two flat panels, scanner, etc.) uses 246W at idle, but if I run up the CPU with cpuburn it uses 282W. This is without making the HDD's or monitors go nuts, which would also spike power consumption considerably more. The point is, as you said, that power consumption based on a published maximum spec is a poor reason to cry foul.
I happen to think that it would be very nice if laptop reviews could create a new metric to benchmark systems with -- pick whatever your benchmark suite you want to create some kind of system performance score, then factor in: 1)the total amount of power the machine consumed to achieve the score 2)the power consumed while the machine is idle and 3)the capacity of the battery and/or the weight of the machine. If users had such a metric, it would be a pretty good way to compare the various offerings between vendors (and even platforms too for that matter) after deciding on certain necessary features such as size of screen, amount of ram, speed of hard disk, etc.
Uh no. The original beta videos at stores were in fact, edited for length to fit on the tape -- which you probably would have known if you'd rented one back then and watched it in a beta machine. What I meant by customers could not record on them was that customers could not record a whole show on them (unless they hit the button at exactly the right time and the program did not run long by even a second).
Later, this problem was somewhat remedied by longer beta tapes, but it was already too late for Beta.
And I am old enough that I own not one, but two consumer betamax decks. I am happy that the old home movies were filmed on Beta instead of VHS since they are much higher quality.
I have been making this argument for a long time; however, it does appear that BluRay is a superior format for a lot of reasons. I am not sure that anything like the Beta/VHS war would actually happen today anyway. That one was mainly fought over the limitations of the technology. Beta lost because the tapes were short, people could not record on them, and studios could not release an entire movie on them.
The BluRay and HDDVD war will be fought over how much money it costs studios to pump out titles in either format. From what I understand, the HD-DVD workflow and format on the disc work pretty much the same as DVD, meaning that a lot of the processes to get to a finished disc are going to be the same as DVD meaning less new software to buy, and less productivity lost due to changing the way a shop works.
Plus, as you said, it has the "DVD" name that people (including the people making the decision as to what format to release the movies in) has a good amount of sway. I think the way they should have done it is to have the two camps fight it out and then the "winner" get to use the HD-DVD mark.
Either that or blu-ray should just change its name to HD+DVD; HAHA!
It's not the best idea, but it's common practice. It probably helps more than it hurts. When you've got thousands of chroot jails set up maintaining them without hardlinks is not only tedious, it takes a non-trivial amount of disk space -- especially if you need users to have access to a decent set of commands and libraries.
If you can gain access to trojan the binaries in a jail, hardlinks or not, you will more than likely have enough access to break out of the jail anyway using many other methods (ptrace, kernel memory attack, mknod, etc.)
Of course there are various techniques and security patches and whatnot that can limit even what a superuser can do in a chroot jail that can eliminate both problems described, but if you are getting into this level of security, either you don't need to discuss it because you already know how to do it, or the discussion probably belongs somewhere other than slashdot.
I think you may be confusing an application presenting limited access to a user vs the application itself actually having limited access.
Chroot can be used to do either; however the implemetations are wildly different. The former can often be accomplished by an application forking a child process to handle a connection and calling a chroot before accepting the connection. The user will have a subset of the system files to access, but an exploit launched against the server process itself could give an attacker more widespread access.
The second involves running the server process itslef inside of a chroot jail such that the actual application (say an ftp server) cannot access anything but files necessary to do its job, even running as superuser, even if attacked with an exploit.
It sounds to me like you actually want to do the former (or both), but are actually doing only the latter.
You should create a chroot jail containing the sshd, sftp, and rssh binaries, everything necessary to run those binaries, and everything necessary to authenticate your users (and only your users -- leave out root and all those funky system accounts!). This jail should also contain the users data directories.
Secondly, you want to set up sftp (when called by sshd and restricted to sftp-only by rssh) to do a chroot onto a users home directory whenever a connection by that user comes in. Alternatively, you can set up sshd to run the called command in a chroot. Patches for openssh or sftp are both available.
As I'm sure you know, chroot is not necessarily a simple feature due to the fact that if you need a full environment to use commands (which aside from forwarding ports is the only thing ssh actually lets you do -- even sftp has a "server" command that gets run by the sftp client), so you can't just automatically have sshd know what library files and binaries are necessary for a user to have certain access.
/home, say, and then jail each user account in /home/user/ with only access to sash, busybox or some similar staticlly compiled multi-command utility.
What you ought to do instead is set up your users with ssh using rssh as a shell. rssh can give you a restricted environment without necessarily having to chroot (if you trust rssh, anyway), but if you really want to deal with the setup and maintenance overhead of a real chroot environment for a shell, rssh can do that too -- every user can have their own jail or they can share a jail and you can use permissions to restrict them.
I can't understand if this is your intent or you'd like sshd to run in a jail -- if that is the case, it's definately not a simple 'switch it on' feature either. The same rules apply except that your user accounts will be futher restricted to the root that sshd is running in. For the ultra paranoid you could jail sshd in
Remember, use hardlinks on all your bins and libs in your chroot jails otherwise you'll forget to update the files!
LED's are considerably more power/cost efficient than both flourescent and incandescent; however they are considerably more expensive also. The best balance comes from flourescent.
The linked bulb also is 12V only.. You'd have to convert your electrical wiring or fixtures to DC to use it in a home anyway and it's probably equivalent to about a 15W bulb. There are some real LED edison-base fixtures, but this is not one. I believe this kind of bulb is most suited to use in RV's and the like where you really need to think about power a lot more than in a regular on-the-grid house.
Many of the better quality/newer CF bulbs do not have the same "warm up" problems as older or cheaper bulbs. In particular the newer sylvania bulbs have the delay but start up at about 85-90% lumen output. Philips Gen IV bulbs do very well both for the delay and the warmup. They are as good as it gets, but they are also expensive.
The main problem with CF is that a good ballast (a good electroniclly controlled ballast can prevent both the startup delay and the warmup) is expensive. There are CF makers who sell a "bulb" that has the ballast seperated from the tube. While a complete fixture from them is about six bucks, replacement tubes are only a dollar or two.
An easy way to tell if you are effectively saving energy with your computer (or other consumer electronics) is to see if the case of the computer or monitor is warm when it hasn't been in use for a few hours (such as when you come home from work or when you get up in the morning). If the back or top of the case are warm to the touch, then the device has been burning power recently.
WTF are computers cars? This suggestion is junk - its totally dependent on how a computer or other device behaves when idle and how the particular system dissapates heat. If you really want to tell how much power your computer uses, then meter it. You can buy a plug-in meter that will tell you exactly how much power something is using for about $30. You can also log the amount of power consumed if you use a smart UPS.
It's also worth noting that configuring agressive power saving options on your system will probalby involve spinning the HDD down anyway pretty much nullifying the argument against shutting the system down helping hard drive failure.
The biggest ways to save power on a computer are:
- Switch to LCD monitors.
- Use DPMS to sleep your monitor instead of using a screensaver.
- Configure your computer to suspend/hibernate after a period of time. Use suspend+wake on lan if you need remote access to your home computer, say, from work.
- Buy energy efficient processors. Intel is coming out with Pentium-M's for the desktop now. There's also VIA's C3's which are very lightweight power consumers considering power/performance anyway.
You also ought to buy a good quality power supply because it will provide cleaner power during power on/off and in general make your components last longer. It will probably also do better in standby mode when it has to provide a decent amount of power without fans cooling it and stuff.
Another recommendation is to purchase a BitsLimited Smartstrip power strip. You can use either a monitor or your computer on the control outlet to automatically switch task lighting on and off with either the system power or the screensaver. It's pretty neat to go up to your computer when the screen is blanked, move the mouse, and have the whole desk light up. If you walk away for 20 minutes, your lights and everything will automatically shut off when your monitor blanks.
Cox is a phone company actually. They sell Cox Digital Telephone -- a voip service that piggybacks on the internet service. Whether or not the FCC can regulate the VoIP part remains in question; however they sure have regulatory control of the CLEC's Cox operates. I think that they could certainly get away with fining any ISP who's a CLEC (most are these days anyway -- even some very small ones).
The question gets harder though when you get your internet service, say, as part of an office lease or something. If your office building wants to block VoIP they probalby could get away with it.
If you have AC that's so bad it destroys power supplies and you own your home, you should seriously consider some decent power conditioners. They cost a few hundred bucks but can seriously help your power on the whole house.