I use gnupg. Not a lot, but with a few people who have it set up right I can just exchange
PGP messages without really doing anything,
which is the way it must be.
I have tried many, many products to do PGP,
and they all have problems. Even GPG with my
favorite mailer had some fairly big setup hurdles. Fortunately once I cleared them it
was relatively easy. I can only imagine that
grandma is never going to use it at the current
state of integration.
PGP functionality needs to work perfectly with
mailers. You enter a pass phrase, and it just
works. Until that happens the masses are not
going to use PGP. This is imporant. If it were
that easy, 90% of e-mail could be PGP encrypted,
by default no questions asked. You can get there
now, but only if you know a lot about PGP, and
communicate with people in the same boat.
Anyone who has used the major vendors Unix
offerings has been hit by some version of "per
user" licensing before. Those who have seen this
conclude they are all broken.
Many unix vendors only allow 2 "users" to be
loged in at once in default installs. Of course,
if you install software that doesn't write to utmp
(be that an SSH server, or a web server, or any
number of other things) then the limit doesn't apply. The number of ways around this are numerous, and most don't even violate the license.
Microsoft, finally getting with the program,
has a similar problem. Their software can finally
support multiple users and applications in a reasonable way. They realize, rightfully so,
that one big honkin machine, running the same software, can serve hundreds of users. Rather
than hundreds of machines, each with a license.
This is a prime example of "value based pricing". I don't think the concept is bad,
but many of the implementations are, well, bad.
I'm afraid that there will never be a good solution to this problem.
The most fair thing I can come up with is to
charge a business per user. Period. If those
users all log into a single computer, or each
have their own, the fee should be the same. Thus
companies can decide to be client server, with a
PC on every desk, or mainframe like, with a big
server or two and dumb terminals, all at the same
cost. In the end, the cost to the software
company to develop both is fairly similar, and
having the price be the same prevents killing one
market in favor of another.
I feel microsoft's wording is overly restrictive here, but at the same time there are
more than a few companies who would only buy one
copy of {Windows, Office, Linux, Photoshop, etc}
if they could find a way to get away with it,
including spending a pile of cash on a central
server. It's really sad that people won't pay
for good software.
TeX has always facinated me. Let's face it, it
works. I believe there is more bugs than he is
writing checks for, but that said they are seldom
encountered by mere mortals. If you do normal
stuff it just works.
There is nothing else like it. No commercial
product, no non-commercial product. If you want
to typeset mathematics, it's the only game in town. If you want to typeset anything, it's one
of very few games in town. It's open source.
It's multi-platform. It has a huge following,
but gets no press.
It really is an amazing thing, and something
that every open source project should aspire to....
I used to deal with some of the ACM contests,
and I can explain a bit about #1. If you do a
contest across colleges you'll find a wide range
of available hardware, from PC's to Sun's to
SGI's to mainframes, to all sorts of other wierd
things. Some places only have dumb terminals
into central servers, some people only have PC's. There has to be a way to make it fair, and
one of the things they did was to always require
that you only get one window on a unix-like system with vi as the text editor. One way or
another most everyone could make that happen.
You're right, but only half right. I wouldn't expect him to be able to just walk through security, for exactly the reasons you describe. The $10 an hour guy can't make that decision. The problem his the report clearly states he spent two days escalating to many non-$10 an hour people who at some point should have been able to verify his story, and figure out a way to get him on the plane.
Let's also be real here, what terrorist is going to spend two days escalting up the food chain to hijack a plane.
The thing that concerns me the most here is the lack of consistency. Anyone who travels has seen this for years, both pre and post 9/11. He had no major issues in one airport, and major problems in another. If we're going to have security, there should at least be an expectation that if you were able to fly somewhere you can return in the same state, and that's far from the case.
While I find this a rather silly example, it
goes to the heart of what a EULA can and can't tell you to do. If a EULA can disallow the sale
of items in a game, couldn't a EULA also prevent
you from using Word to write a paper that badmouths Microsoft? Could a EULA for an e-mail
program prevent you from sending e-mail to
because they
are evil bad people?
In the world of a negociated license agreement of course they could limit you from
all of these things. It happens all the time.
For instance, if Pepsi has their name on something it often has a "morals clause", get caught with your pants down and the deal is null and void.
The issue here is that the consumer has no
power. You can't go to them and say "I'll pay
an extra $5 to license it so I can sell items
in the game." With shrink wrap EULA's the consumer generally must agree to what the monopoly seller dictates. That's not good.
In any event, if I were a laywer I'd argue that the sale was not of goods, but of a service.
Since nothing tangeable changes hands, what you
are doing is paying someone to play the game for
you, and in the end type some commands in the
game that make it easy (say, by picking up) an
object. Imagine if you couldn't hire someone
to type in a word doc for you. We all find this
silly, people hire secretaries every day to type
in word docs. If that's ok, then it must be ok
to hire someone and say "I'll give you $10 if you
play the game until you get the red glowing thing
and give it to me." It's a service, it's paying
someone for their time, and EULA's can't limit
your rights to be employed.
Buy a small van/SUV. Buy laptops with 802.11.
Get an access point, and a server.
When you go tech, find a local church, school,
or other hall with folding tables. Slap down the
laptops, turn on the AP, and you're good to go.
It's very simple. It's durable, laptops are
made to be moved around. You can increase or
decrease the number of clients with ease, just
add or remove laptops. You can probably also carry enough for 50-100 people, if you needed
to do that. Also, laptops with batteries won't
die if you accidently blow a breaker somewhere.
I'm afraid the author missed the boat completely with a fundamental assumption. The client comes with "limited reach", that is you don't hit every server on the network, just a reasonable number of local servers. The author
then just decides that this is bad, and that
users will want to contact all servers for every
query.
That would be a bad idea.
In fact, the user doesn't care if they can
contact all the servers, they only care that they
can contact a single server with the song that
they want. One user shares a song with 5 people,
who share with 5 people (25 + 5 = 30), who share with
5 people (125 + 30 = 180) who share with 5 people,
(625 + 180 = 805), who each share with 5 people
(3125 + 805 = 3930). Well, look at that, nearly
4000 people had the song, and each user only had
to talk to 6 other servers (one to download, 5 to send).
If every user had to talk to every other user there would be no way for the system to survive.
The key to scaling is to distribute the content, which means you don't need to hit every server. Of course, this doesn't
mean the system will survive, but I believe the
observed real world is a teeny fraction of what
this paper puts forth as reality.
I think there are a lot of people who want to support apple, but haven't seen the products that allow them to spent their hard earned money on that project.
The Mac has always been superior to Microsoft offerings. Unfortunately that's not enough. Unless you have the apps, or everyone else uses your platform you can't exchange files. Between Office, and OS X (bringing Unix to the desktop)
Apple has briged the gap, at least for now.
The new iMac is nice. Not nice enough to sell
on it's own, but with software it is a killer
platform. Apple has also always understood
simpler is better. As a geek, I don't want
photos to consume my time. A non-geek would
just want it to work, I'm sure. With the software
the new iMac can do everything.
I think Apple is on the rebound, and I hope the
new iMac sells like hotcakes.
I've wanted an iPod since they came out. They
are small, work extremely well, and produce good
sound. Even with the high price, they are worth
while. Of course, the problem is you really need
a Mac to make all the bells and whistles work.
This isn't a problem for apple though.
Between the iPod, the ease of creating a home
DVD (iMovie, iDVD, + third party high end stuff,
if you need it), manipulating pictures (iPhoto)
and organizing your music (iTunes) Apple has got
it right. I used to be a Mac lover, and now I'm
ready to become one all over again. After seeing
the new iMac in the store (which will fit on the
kitchen desk, something my PC never has done) I'm
going in whole hog.
What does that mean for apple? Well, they will
get me for an iMac plus an iPod. Additionally
someone (cannon, likely) will get a MinDV and a
new still digial camera out of it. The digital
hub is here, and is only going to get better.
The hold up for the Mac has always been other
software. For my needs that's all there as well
now. There are good ssh clients and terminal
emulators. Office works, better than windows in
fact. IE is available (yes, for web work you
have to have it). Heck, there are even respectable games these days.
I think Apple is on the comeback, and I think
their digital hub is a smash hit idea, both for
the home user who "just wants it to work", as well
as for the geek who "just wants the mundane to
work" so he can get on with the cool stuff.
I've used Autocad for a number of purposes,
and I must say it's worth the time investment.
There are huge libraries both free and commercial
for autocad. It is the default format wanted by
all commercial design firms, no matter what they
do.
It can appear complicated when you first use
it, but it really isn't. It doesn't automate much, meaning you draw a lot of detail, but I
am constantly amazed when that detail helps me
later. If you're actually going to build something everything is in the details, and you need to draw them. I've built everything from
extra rooms to computer networks off autocad,
and knowing where every screw goes, the exact
dimensions of every object and all that is really
helpful.
Many community colleges and community outreach
programs offer courses for free (or cheap). It can be worth it, not because autocad is hard, but because thinking like a draftsman is hard. You have to think about coordinates, both carteasian
and polar. Polar really are your friend. You have to think about layers, components, and objects. It's really not hard, and it becomes second nature faster than you would think.
Autoconf is a tool that in the end can only
make portability choices for you. In order for
those choices to mean anything you have to have
a need for your software to be portable (to a
wide number of platforms, really), and you need
to understand the real issues with writing portable software.
If you're writing for FreeBSD, Solaris, and
Linux 98% of the time for application software
you can write it so there are no portability issues. Why have the autoconf step when you
can "make;make install"? Modern systems are not
all that different for high level stuff, and
are converging for medium level stuff. It's
really only the low level details keeping them
apart.
If on the other hand running on an old Ultrix
box, and on your SCO Unix box, or on that PDP-11
in your garage is important autoconf can give you
the mechanisms to make all that work but only if you know that differences between the platforms, and what changes need to happen to
your code to make it work. It does no
good to have autoconf check to see if bzero
exists if you don't know to use memcpy as an
alternative, or vice versa. A check without
an alternative is just a way of bombing a little
sooner than the compile stage.
The other thing autoconf can help with is
optional packages. These are not portability
issues per se, but rather choices that need to
be made, but often aren't worth bothering a
user about. Consider the application that's
all command line based except for a single X
app that's not really needed, just nifty. Well,
if the system doesn't have X, you don't build
it, and if there's no X it's unlikely the user
wanted to run X apps anyway.
As far as the mechanics go, autoconf is fairly
easy. Once you understand the changes that need
to happen making autoconf make them for you is
trivial.
Load average is a measure of the number of
things 'waiting' to run. Depending on your OS
this may or may not include a number of intersting
corner cases. In particular, this almost always
includes things like disk i/o, and tty i/o. A
user with a CPU bound process won't notice disk
i/o issues, and vice versa.
So what is the range of acceptable? Well, for
a single user workstation a load average of 1
(one thing waiting) probably means the user is
waiting, and you may want more CPU or disk
bandwidth. On the other hand, a highly multi-user
machine (say a news server) may get optimal transfer rates out of the disk hardware by
having a lot of things waiting so it can schedule
reads and writes.
Look at all the resources on your machine,
use tools like vmstat, iostat, netstat, etc.
See why processes are waiting. Look at your
user load and see if it's ok. For instance,
with a 100Mbps ethernet, you could serve 10
users at 10Mbps each, or 100 at 1Mbps each.
The later will have a higher load average, but
if 1Mbps per user is fine with you, then there
is no problem.
To give some real world examples. I've seen
news and mail servers both run load averages well
over 200, and sill deliver acceptable performance.
I've also seen shell servers with load averages
as small as 5 that are very sluggish (often
because they are swapping).
The question is, could Dell have forseen
this problem when they designed the laptop. That's a hard question to answer, and in fact
may never be answered. If they could have,
then I think they have more responsibility.
If not, they still have some, but much less
since they used the best practices available
at the time.
That said, of more interest to me is the
remedy. To get use out of the laptop for 2
years (well, 92% of the time) and then want
them to replace it is just crazy. Also, to
expect them to keep repairing it (now that the
problem is known) is also crazy. I think the
best thing for Dell and for you is for them to
offer a steep discount on a new laptop provided
you trade in your old one so they never have
to deal with it again.
There are multiple ways to locate a cell phone
or pager, and I suspect they will use all of them.
Some have already mentioned GPS, that's rare to non-existant in today's devices. More likely are
triangulation, or simple signal strength.
Several cell providers have been using triangulation to work towards the E911 requirements. Rather than implement expensive GPS solutions, they simply track a phone from multiple antennas, and triangulate the location of the phone from that. While normal accuracy is only
+- a quarter mile, in an instance like this local portable cells could bet set up around the site and generate high accuracy.
Even if that can't be done, making a cell phone talk to the cell site (telling it to reregister, for instance) would allow you to listen for its signal with a strength meter. Walk away it reduces, walk towards it gets stronger. In a relatively small area like this it would work well.
Of course, there is also low tech. If they ring the phones, and make the area quiet, they can hear them ring. For those very near the surface this could be particularly effective.
Others have commented on batteries. Many cell phones are probably running low, but I would venture about 1/3 of today's phones last a week on standby, and would still be able to ring. Two way pagers and other communications devices often last longer, two weeks or more at a go. They could still have a huge number of these devices active. That said, they need to be careful. Ringing them too much will run out batteries.
I woke up this morning and read e-mail. I was
about to get up and leave for work,when for some
reason I decided to turn on the TV and see what
was going on. It was literally minutes after the
first plane had hit, and it was just coming on
the news. I sat rivited.
Once collected, I checked in with work again.
My company was taking emergency precautions, as
I suspose almost all companies located anywhere
near the activities were. Worried not only for
my safety (working near a potential target),
but also about traffic and other issues I decided
to work from home watching the network.
While I can't say I provided a lot of help,
I did help insure that an IP network worked, and
received several reports of people able to connect
with loved ones over e-mail or instant messages
when the phone system had failed them. On the one
hand I don't feel that I did much, on the other
hand I am proud that in my own way I was able to
help people connect.
This is a dark day for America. Like most, I
am angry, and at this time I can't get past that.
While I want the government to be sure of the
responsible parties, right now once they are found
I think they should be punished in the most
severe way possible, including a tatical nuclear
strike, if appropriate. The death toll here
appears to be as bad, or worse than Pearl Harbor,
and I hope it doesn't take years of war to end it,
this time.
I have neither a Linux box nor have I used this software, but I do have a thought. Does this software know how to software encode/decode non-publically specified video formats, or have
drivers to talk to cards that know how to decode
such formats? There could be circumvention and/or
IP issues as a result that they are trying to
avoid.
If I buy a ford truck, and jack it up, put
a light bar on it, custom paint it, tweek the
motor and do all sorts of wacky stuff Ford doesn't
sue me for violating their "IP". They don't
ask me to take the name off of it. In fact, if
I make kits to modify the vehicles they are happy
as a clam, as it sells more cars.
If I buy a house, add an addition, change the
colors on the walls, swap out the heater, and then
tell people it's a "Toll Bothers Hose" they don't
sue me for violating their IP. I can rip the walls down and 'reverse engineer' it all I want.
Now, if I buy a mindstorms kit and write better
software for it, that's grounds to sue?
You mean, if you're nice to them they
bring you beer?
-- Feminist at a frat
party in PCU.
I dove in, and found the pool empty.
on
Netscape 6.1
·
· Score: 1
Hoping to upgrade my tired Netscape 4.7 setup
I decided to give Netscape 6.1 a go. I tried on
a Windows 98 box, not wanting to push my luck yet
with a Unix version. The install went smoothly
and quickly, it appeared all was well.
That lasted for about 3 seconds. The installer
auto-launched Netscape 6.1, which promptly hung.
I let it sit for 3 minutes before CTL-ATL-DEL'ing
it. I reran it then and it came up. I went
right for the preferences, to make sure they were
acceptable. Boom, a crash while closing a
section in the preferences menu.
Launch again. Go to my own web site, it hangs
mid-download on the home page. 3 minutes
later it's CTL-ATL-DEL again.
Launch again, go to the netscape web site, move
the scroll bar, bam, another crash.
Go to the control panel, deinstall Netscape
6.1. Go to slashdot and post about experiences, using Netscape 4.7.
I might try Mozilla again. 3 months ago it
was still unstable on windows and very slow
compared to 4.7 or IE. I find it sad, but I
think Netscape (and possibly Mozilla) are going
to be too little to late to get any market share
and use. I may be using 4.7 for a very long
time.
1. Did he have permission to install/run the
client on the computers? We don't have a solid
answer to this one, but I would suspect a court
would find the answer was yes. The school
employed him to administer the computer. In liu
of giving him explicit instructions, they were
relying on him to A) Stay within the bounds of
the law (eg, no illegal copies of software) and
B) use his best profesional judgement on the best
way to admin the machine. So, assuming they didn't place some more restrictive guidelines
on him I don't see how they can complain much
about him installing / running the software,
from a permission point of view.
2. Did he have the right to use the network
resources that he did? Clearly, these cost the
university money, and so there is an issue here.
Again, I suspect the problem will come down to
guidelines. A univeristy that provides students
access in the dorms and doesn't prohibit (not
prevent, prohibit) things like, oh viewing porn,
playing online games, accessing stock quotes
(unless in a finance class) etc etc etc would
have a hard time complaining about someone
running rc5.
Bottom line, they cannot apply selective standards, even more so when they are government
sponsored. If there was something in writing that
applied to all that covered this, or if there were
specific instructions given to him, then he's
screwed. If, on the other hand they simply have
the general "don't do anything illegal" clause,
they are going to have to try and fall back to
the "using the computers for something other than
learning", and that's a dangerous path for them
to walk down. If they go down that road with
this guy fairness would demand they crack down
on many other activities by many other people
(including, probably, reading this article,
unless the person is a computer admin or a
law student) and would find themselves in a
position they don't want to be in.
Oh yeah, $0.59/second? What is that
crap? I suspect their actual cost is under
1/100 of a cent per second, if that.
At least one of the reasons on pre-drilled racks
is at pre-drilling rails is very expensive. To
drill and tap a 7' rail with high precision takes
expensive gear, and a lot of time. This is why
racks with pop in nuts and the like are so much
cheaper, but if you've ever worked with them you
know they are a huge pain.
Slashdot Mirror
Until the plugins ship with the mailer, it is not seamless.
I use gnupg. Not a lot, but with a few people who have it set up right I can just exchange PGP messages without really doing anything, which is the way it must be.
I have tried many, many products to do PGP, and they all have problems. Even GPG with my favorite mailer had some fairly big setup hurdles. Fortunately once I cleared them it was relatively easy. I can only imagine that grandma is never going to use it at the current state of integration.
PGP functionality needs to work perfectly with mailers. You enter a pass phrase, and it just works. Until that happens the masses are not going to use PGP. This is imporant. If it were that easy, 90% of e-mail could be PGP encrypted, by default no questions asked. You can get there now, but only if you know a lot about PGP, and communicate with people in the same boat.
Anyone who has used the major vendors Unix offerings has been hit by some version of "per user" licensing before. Those who have seen this conclude they are all broken.
Many unix vendors only allow 2 "users" to be loged in at once in default installs. Of course, if you install software that doesn't write to utmp (be that an SSH server, or a web server, or any number of other things) then the limit doesn't apply. The number of ways around this are numerous, and most don't even violate the license.
Microsoft, finally getting with the program, has a similar problem. Their software can finally support multiple users and applications in a reasonable way. They realize, rightfully so, that one big honkin machine, running the same software, can serve hundreds of users. Rather than hundreds of machines, each with a license.
This is a prime example of "value based pricing". I don't think the concept is bad, but many of the implementations are, well, bad. I'm afraid that there will never be a good solution to this problem.
The most fair thing I can come up with is to charge a business per user. Period. If those users all log into a single computer, or each have their own, the fee should be the same. Thus companies can decide to be client server, with a PC on every desk, or mainframe like, with a big server or two and dumb terminals, all at the same cost. In the end, the cost to the software company to develop both is fairly similar, and having the price be the same prevents killing one market in favor of another.
I feel microsoft's wording is overly restrictive here, but at the same time there are more than a few companies who would only buy one copy of {Windows, Office, Linux, Photoshop, etc} if they could find a way to get away with it, including spending a pile of cash on a central server. It's really sad that people won't pay for good software.
TeX has always facinated me. Let's face it, it works. I believe there is more bugs than he is writing checks for, but that said they are seldom encountered by mere mortals. If you do normal stuff it just works.
There is nothing else like it. No commercial product, no non-commercial product. If you want to typeset mathematics, it's the only game in town. If you want to typeset anything, it's one of very few games in town. It's open source. It's multi-platform. It has a huge following, but gets no press.
It really is an amazing thing, and something that every open source project should aspire to....
I used to deal with some of the ACM contests, and I can explain a bit about #1. If you do a contest across colleges you'll find a wide range of available hardware, from PC's to Sun's to SGI's to mainframes, to all sorts of other wierd things. Some places only have dumb terminals into central servers, some people only have PC's. There has to be a way to make it fair, and one of the things they did was to always require that you only get one window on a unix-like system with vi as the text editor. One way or another most everyone could make that happen.
You're right, but only half right. I wouldn't
expect him to be able to just walk through security, for exactly the reasons you describe.
The $10 an hour guy can't make that decision.
The problem his the report clearly states he
spent two days escalating to many
non-$10 an hour people who at some point should
have been able to verify his story, and figure out
a way to get him on the plane.
Let's also be real here, what terrorist is
going to spend two days escalting up the food
chain to hijack a plane.
The thing that concerns me the most here is
the lack of consistency. Anyone who travels has
seen this for years, both pre and post 9/11.
He had no major issues in one airport, and major
problems in another. If we're going to have
security, there should at least be an expectation
that if you were able to fly somewhere you can
return in the same state, and that's far from
the case.
While I find this a rather silly example, it goes to the heart of what a EULA can and can't tell you to do. If a EULA can disallow the sale of items in a game, couldn't a EULA also prevent you from using Word to write a paper that badmouths Microsoft? Could a EULA for an e-mail program prevent you from sending e-mail to because they are evil bad people?
In the world of a negociated license agreement of course they could limit you from all of these things. It happens all the time. For instance, if Pepsi has their name on something it often has a "morals clause", get caught with your pants down and the deal is null and void.
The issue here is that the consumer has no power. You can't go to them and say "I'll pay an extra $5 to license it so I can sell items in the game." With shrink wrap EULA's the consumer generally must agree to what the monopoly seller dictates. That's not good.
In any event, if I were a laywer I'd argue that the sale was not of goods, but of a service. Since nothing tangeable changes hands, what you are doing is paying someone to play the game for you, and in the end type some commands in the game that make it easy (say, by picking up) an object. Imagine if you couldn't hire someone to type in a word doc for you. We all find this silly, people hire secretaries every day to type in word docs. If that's ok, then it must be ok to hire someone and say "I'll give you $10 if you play the game until you get the red glowing thing and give it to me." It's a service, it's paying someone for their time, and EULA's can't limit your rights to be employed.
Bah.
The answer is easy, 42. It's nice you finally found the question.
Buy a small van/SUV. Buy laptops with 802.11. Get an access point, and a server.
When you go tech, find a local church, school, or other hall with folding tables. Slap down the laptops, turn on the AP, and you're good to go.
It's very simple. It's durable, laptops are made to be moved around. You can increase or decrease the number of clients with ease, just add or remove laptops. You can probably also carry enough for 50-100 people, if you needed to do that. Also, laptops with batteries won't die if you accidently blow a breaker somewhere.
It's not fancy, but it would be easy and cheap.
I'm afraid the author missed the boat completely with a fundamental assumption. The client comes with "limited reach", that is you don't hit every server on the network, just a reasonable number of local servers. The author then just decides that this is bad, and that users will want to contact all servers for every query.
That would be a bad idea.
In fact, the user doesn't care if they can contact all the servers, they only care that they can contact a single server with the song that they want. One user shares a song with 5 people, who share with 5 people (25 + 5 = 30), who share with 5 people (125 + 30 = 180) who share with 5 people, (625 + 180 = 805), who each share with 5 people (3125 + 805 = 3930). Well, look at that, nearly 4000 people had the song, and each user only had to talk to 6 other servers (one to download, 5 to send).
If every user had to talk to every other user there would be no way for the system to survive. The key to scaling is to distribute the content, which means you don't need to hit every server . Of course, this doesn't mean the system will survive, but I believe the observed real world is a teeny fraction of what this paper puts forth as reality.
I think there are a lot of people who want to support apple, but haven't seen the products that allow them to spent their hard earned money on that project.
The Mac has always been superior to Microsoft offerings. Unfortunately that's not enough. Unless you have the apps, or everyone else uses your platform you can't exchange files. Between Office, and OS X (bringing Unix to the desktop) Apple has briged the gap, at least for now.
The new iMac is nice. Not nice enough to sell on it's own, but with software it is a killer platform. Apple has also always understood simpler is better. As a geek, I don't want photos to consume my time. A non-geek would just want it to work, I'm sure. With the software the new iMac can do everything.
I think Apple is on the rebound, and I hope the new iMac sells like hotcakes.
I've wanted an iPod since they came out. They are small, work extremely well, and produce good sound. Even with the high price, they are worth while. Of course, the problem is you really need a Mac to make all the bells and whistles work. This isn't a problem for apple though.
Between the iPod, the ease of creating a home DVD (iMovie, iDVD, + third party high end stuff, if you need it), manipulating pictures (iPhoto) and organizing your music (iTunes) Apple has got it right. I used to be a Mac lover, and now I'm ready to become one all over again. After seeing the new iMac in the store (which will fit on the kitchen desk, something my PC never has done) I'm going in whole hog.
What does that mean for apple? Well, they will get me for an iMac plus an iPod. Additionally someone (cannon, likely) will get a MinDV and a new still digial camera out of it. The digital hub is here, and is only going to get better.
The hold up for the Mac has always been other software. For my needs that's all there as well now. There are good ssh clients and terminal emulators. Office works, better than windows in fact. IE is available (yes, for web work you have to have it). Heck, there are even respectable games these days.
I think Apple is on the comeback, and I think their digital hub is a smash hit idea, both for the home user who "just wants it to work", as well as for the geek who "just wants the mundane to work" so he can get on with the cool stuff.
I've used Autocad for a number of purposes, and I must say it's worth the time investment. There are huge libraries both free and commercial for autocad. It is the default format wanted by all commercial design firms, no matter what they do.
It can appear complicated when you first use it, but it really isn't. It doesn't automate much, meaning you draw a lot of detail, but I am constantly amazed when that detail helps me later. If you're actually going to build something everything is in the details, and you need to draw them. I've built everything from extra rooms to computer networks off autocad, and knowing where every screw goes, the exact dimensions of every object and all that is really helpful.
Many community colleges and community outreach programs offer courses for free (or cheap). It can be worth it, not because autocad is hard, but because thinking like a draftsman is hard. You have to think about coordinates, both carteasian and polar. Polar really are your friend. You have to think about layers, components, and objects. It's really not hard, and it becomes second nature faster than you would think.
Autoconf is a tool that in the end can only make portability choices for you. In order for those choices to mean anything you have to have a need for your software to be portable (to a wide number of platforms, really), and you need to understand the real issues with writing portable software.
If you're writing for FreeBSD, Solaris, and Linux 98% of the time for application software you can write it so there are no portability issues. Why have the autoconf step when you can "make;make install"? Modern systems are not all that different for high level stuff, and are converging for medium level stuff. It's really only the low level details keeping them apart.
If on the other hand running on an old Ultrix box, and on your SCO Unix box, or on that PDP-11 in your garage is important autoconf can give you the mechanisms to make all that work but only if you know that differences between the platforms, and what changes need to happen to your code to make it work . It does no good to have autoconf check to see if bzero exists if you don't know to use memcpy as an alternative, or vice versa. A check without an alternative is just a way of bombing a little sooner than the compile stage.
The other thing autoconf can help with is optional packages. These are not portability issues per se, but rather choices that need to be made, but often aren't worth bothering a user about. Consider the application that's all command line based except for a single X app that's not really needed, just nifty. Well, if the system doesn't have X, you don't build it, and if there's no X it's unlikely the user wanted to run X apps anyway.
As far as the mechanics go, autoconf is fairly easy. Once you understand the changes that need to happen making autoconf make them for you is trivial.
Load average is a measure of the number of things 'waiting' to run. Depending on your OS this may or may not include a number of intersting corner cases. In particular, this almost always includes things like disk i/o, and tty i/o. A user with a CPU bound process won't notice disk i/o issues, and vice versa.
So what is the range of acceptable? Well, for a single user workstation a load average of 1 (one thing waiting) probably means the user is waiting, and you may want more CPU or disk bandwidth. On the other hand, a highly multi-user machine (say a news server) may get optimal transfer rates out of the disk hardware by having a lot of things waiting so it can schedule reads and writes.
Look at all the resources on your machine, use tools like vmstat, iostat, netstat, etc. See why processes are waiting. Look at your user load and see if it's ok. For instance, with a 100Mbps ethernet, you could serve 10 users at 10Mbps each, or 100 at 1Mbps each. The later will have a higher load average, but if 1Mbps per user is fine with you, then there is no problem.
To give some real world examples. I've seen news and mail servers both run load averages well over 200, and sill deliver acceptable performance. I've also seen shell servers with load averages as small as 5 that are very sluggish (often because they are swapping).
The question is, could Dell have forseen this problem when they designed the laptop. That's a hard question to answer, and in fact may never be answered. If they could have, then I think they have more responsibility. If not, they still have some, but much less since they used the best practices available at the time.
That said, of more interest to me is the remedy. To get use out of the laptop for 2 years (well, 92% of the time) and then want them to replace it is just crazy. Also, to expect them to keep repairing it (now that the problem is known) is also crazy. I think the best thing for Dell and for you is for them to offer a steep discount on a new laptop provided you trade in your old one so they never have to deal with it again.
There are multiple ways to locate a cell phone or pager, and I suspect they will use all of them. Some have already mentioned GPS, that's rare to non-existant in today's devices. More likely are triangulation, or simple signal strength.
Several cell providers have been using triangulation to work towards the E911 requirements. Rather than implement expensive GPS solutions, they simply track a phone from multiple antennas, and triangulate the location of the phone from that. While normal accuracy is only +- a quarter mile, in an instance like this local portable cells could bet set up around the site and generate high accuracy.
Even if that can't be done, making a cell phone talk to the cell site (telling it to reregister, for instance) would allow you to listen for its signal with a strength meter. Walk away it reduces, walk towards it gets stronger. In a relatively small area like this it would work well.
Of course, there is also low tech. If they ring the phones, and make the area quiet, they can hear them ring. For those very near the surface this could be particularly effective.
Others have commented on batteries. Many cell phones are probably running low, but I would venture about 1/3 of today's phones last a week on standby, and would still be able to ring. Two way pagers and other communications devices often last longer, two weeks or more at a go. They could still have a huge number of these devices active. That said, they need to be careful. Ringing them too much will run out batteries.
I wish them luck, it's a good idea.
I woke up this morning and read e-mail. I was about to get up and leave for work,when for some reason I decided to turn on the TV and see what was going on. It was literally minutes after the first plane had hit, and it was just coming on the news. I sat rivited.
Once collected, I checked in with work again. My company was taking emergency precautions, as I suspose almost all companies located anywhere near the activities were. Worried not only for my safety (working near a potential target), but also about traffic and other issues I decided to work from home watching the network.
While I can't say I provided a lot of help, I did help insure that an IP network worked, and received several reports of people able to connect with loved ones over e-mail or instant messages when the phone system had failed them. On the one hand I don't feel that I did much, on the other hand I am proud that in my own way I was able to help people connect.
This is a dark day for America. Like most, I am angry, and at this time I can't get past that. While I want the government to be sure of the responsible parties, right now once they are found I think they should be punished in the most severe way possible, including a tatical nuclear strike, if appropriate. The death toll here appears to be as bad, or worse than Pearl Harbor, and I hope it doesn't take years of war to end it, this time.
May god have mercy on all of us.
I have neither a Linux box nor have I used this software, but I do have a thought. Does this software know how to software encode/decode non-publically specified video formats, or have drivers to talk to cards that know how to decode such formats? There could be circumvention and/or IP issues as a result that they are trying to avoid.
If I buy a ford truck, and jack it up, put a light bar on it, custom paint it, tweek the motor and do all sorts of wacky stuff Ford doesn't sue me for violating their "IP". They don't ask me to take the name off of it. In fact, if I make kits to modify the vehicles they are happy as a clam, as it sells more cars.
If I buy a house, add an addition, change the colors on the walls, swap out the heater, and then tell people it's a "Toll Bothers Hose" they don't sue me for violating their IP. I can rip the walls down and 'reverse engineer' it all I want.
Now, if I buy a mindstorms kit and write better software for it, that's grounds to sue?
This is all way out of hand.
when they finally get things back up. :-)
You mean, if you're nice to them they bring you beer?
-- Feminist at a frat party in PCU.Hoping to upgrade my tired Netscape 4.7 setup I decided to give Netscape 6.1 a go. I tried on a Windows 98 box, not wanting to push my luck yet with a Unix version. The install went smoothly and quickly, it appeared all was well.
That lasted for about 3 seconds. The installer auto-launched Netscape 6.1, which promptly hung. I let it sit for 3 minutes before CTL-ATL-DEL'ing it. I reran it then and it came up. I went right for the preferences, to make sure they were acceptable. Boom, a crash while closing a section in the preferences menu.
Launch again. Go to my own web site, it hangs mid-download on the home page. 3 minutes later it's CTL-ATL-DEL again.
Launch again, go to the netscape web site, move the scroll bar, bam, another crash.
Go to the control panel, deinstall Netscape 6.1. Go to slashdot and post about experiences, using Netscape 4.7.
I might try Mozilla again. 3 months ago it was still unstable on windows and very slow compared to 4.7 or IE. I find it sad, but I think Netscape (and possibly Mozilla) are going to be too little to late to get any market share and use. I may be using 4.7 for a very long time.
1. Did he have permission to install/run the client on the computers? We don't have a solid answer to this one, but I would suspect a court would find the answer was yes. The school employed him to administer the computer. In liu of giving him explicit instructions, they were relying on him to A) Stay within the bounds of the law (eg, no illegal copies of software) and B) use his best profesional judgement on the best way to admin the machine. So, assuming they didn't place some more restrictive guidelines on him I don't see how they can complain much about him installing / running the software, from a permission point of view.
2. Did he have the right to use the network resources that he did? Clearly, these cost the university money, and so there is an issue here. Again, I suspect the problem will come down to guidelines. A univeristy that provides students access in the dorms and doesn't prohibit (not prevent, prohibit) things like, oh viewing porn, playing online games, accessing stock quotes (unless in a finance class) etc etc etc would have a hard time complaining about someone running rc5.
Bottom line, they cannot apply selective standards, even more so when they are government sponsored. If there was something in writing that applied to all that covered this, or if there were specific instructions given to him, then he's screwed. If, on the other hand they simply have the general "don't do anything illegal" clause, they are going to have to try and fall back to the "using the computers for something other than learning", and that's a dangerous path for them to walk down. If they go down that road with this guy fairness would demand they crack down on many other activities by many other people (including, probably, reading this article, unless the person is a computer admin or a law student) and would find themselves in a position they don't want to be in.
Oh yeah, $0.59/second? What is that crap? I suspect their actual cost is under 1/100 of a cent per second, if that.
At least one of the reasons on pre-drilled racks is at pre-drilling rails is very expensive. To drill and tap a 7' rail with high precision takes expensive gear, and a lot of time. This is why racks with pop in nuts and the like are so much cheaper, but if you've ever worked with them you know they are a huge pain.