I recall a few year back, this was discussed amongst GNU folks, and others as a mechanism to prevent proprietary vendors from locking 'us' (us being Open Source developers, users and businesses) out of important inventions.
I have only seen one 'iffy' thing ever come out of Red Hat (the RHN server, which is an in-house secret...though they appear to be helpful with the Current developers), so I tend to believe they have no intention of using this offensively against Open Source companies or users.
Besides, I seem to recall the GPL protects us against anyone integrating incompatibly licensed code into GPL software. TUX is part of the Linux kernel, thus it cannot be restricted or fees enforced on its use. Red Hat would have a bear of a time rewriting TUX independently of the kernel (Ingo could do it, of course), but the damage is done. Those inventions (and inventions they are...Ingo does really cool stuff, this isn't a one-click patent folks) are already in the development kernels. We (the community) already own these developments.
So, what I'm trying to say is:
Thank you very much, Ingo and Red Hat. I am very appreciative of the interesting inventions you have given to us. I forward to learning about them, using them, and enjoying the benefits they give us. And boy, that sure was clever of you to patent it, so that Microsoft will have a bit of trouble stepping on your toes in the future. Way to play hardball!
I don't know if it is universally the practice at Gigabyte, but the networking server group there have been great. They've always made sure up-to-date drivers shipped with everything I've gotten from them. Some of their boards ship with Promise ataraid controllers, and while they couldn't get me the docs they tell me the techs there have been campaigning Promise to be more forthcoming (and they do provide binary drivers for those controllers--I don't use them, but they are there and Gigabyte actually apologized for not having source drivers available).
Matrox seems to be good too, as I've never had trouble getting their video boards to work right out of the box with X (as I understand it the Matrox folks are more helpful than most to the X developers).
That said, Promise is clearly bad for refusing to release their drivers in source form (I guess they think their software RAID technology is so advanced it would give their competitors a great benefit--or maybe they are embarassed to let us see it). Logitech have never been friendly to the OSS world about their QuickCam cameras. I think a lot of printer manufacturers have been a nuisance in this regard (I gave up on trying to figure it all out and bought a Postscript-capable network printer). I'd be curious about good and well supported inkjet printers, though...
Oh, yeah, our Microtek X6EL scanner works great with Linux and SANE. I don't know if the manufacturer is to be credited partially or if the driver author was just heroic in his efforts, but it works exceedingly well.
I'm nearing completion of my first book for publication, and I'm not at all opposed to used editions being available for purchase.
Then again, I've had
my book available for free online since I wrote the first 30 pages or so. And I intend to keep the free version available after it is printed by No Starch in a couple of months. I guess I'm one of them weirdos who thinks content creators shouldn't extract money from their customers at every possible opportunity. I like musicians who sell their records for reasonable prices (Dischord records, That Dog before they split, etc.) and authors who don't really think everyone should have to pay $45 for their books (Bruce Eckel). I'm all for getting paid, and paying folks who have done the work, but I'm also for letting people decide if a work is worth shelling out the dough for.
I guess this Open Source thing has gotten to me. Or maybe it was the punk rock thing ("give the kids their moneys worth"). Regardless, prices on new books are probably higher than they ought to be, and if I often buy used ones if I can't get it new for a reasonable price--the new price always dictates whether I get it at my local Half Price Books or at BookPool.
I've so far been disappointed by all of the April Fools stuff I've seen except the MaraDNS version 0.9.90 announcement this morning. Very satisfying and very subtle, that one. This other stuff? Bleh!
Pigeons searching the web? Where's the subtlety in that? Where's the surprise? The Slashdot bit was mildly entertaining, Freshmeat was just a groaner. There has to be surprise to really get a good laugh going, and I just wasn't surprised by these things. Maybe I'm jaded from reading them for too long and knowing what to expect from them.
Oh, well, I'll quit griping now. Maybe I'll go read the MaraDNS release announcement again. That'll put me in a better mood, I reckon.
Re:You /. people really like the word "monopoly"
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Is this a troll? Really...You don't think that the Bells are naturally occurring monopoly, do you?
The Bell monopolies have never been natural. They have always been, and continue to be propped up by the government. They are the very crookedest kind of monopoly--the kind that is backed up by force, law, and the taxman. Who in their right mind would try to compete with a monopoly that has the backing of the entire US government behind it? (Hmmm...let's name the folks who tried: Covad, Rhythms, etc. etc. How are they doing these days? )
BTW-The Bells do not provide good service. My ADSL link through SWBell sucks. DNS is down weekly, mail service is intermittent at best, etc.
Unfortunately the government didn't keep their hands off of Enron...Enron's board of directors featured a number of quite large Republican supporters (where support==boatloads of money). Enron bought and paid for their government protection, and got it all the way til the end (and are still getting it today in the form of not going to jail for fraud).
Up until that point I was all in favour of what you were doping, but BEWARE THE BOTS! A bot will never be very accurate - use people! Unfortunately human judgements are a high-workload activity...sigh...
I guess I didn't make it clear...The list will be entirely human edited. No bot generated entries will go into the list unchecked. That's what I get for posting about it before the "Philosophy" page goes up.
This question came a little too soon, but I can't pass up the chance to enlist some volunteers...
We (Swell Technology and a few brave volunteers) are starting a community generated and edited block list project called Penguin Feet which will be located at www.penguinfeet.org. The system will be free, easy to use, and based on GPLed tools, and the list will be publicly accessible at all times--and more importantly the project will be entirely accountable to the community that develops it. No more blocking Time magazine for running an anti-censorship article, no more blocking PeaceFire, no more blocking Amnesty International, or NOW. It will be about blocking those sites that are judged by a number of volunteer and paid editors to be inappropriate for young children. The goal is to provide a free content control system that is as effective as any proprietary system.
Anyone wanting to help out by being a contributor (search for porn and hate sites and submit them), and editor (look at the found porn and hate speech), a coder (database and perl knowledge needed), an integrator (SquidGuard+Squid is first, if you've got ideas for doing this on any other proxy contact me), or a skeptic (complain about sites that are blocked that shouldn't be) should contact us at penguinfeet@swelltech.com.
Anyway...We're about a month or two away from first launch (gotta get the database box colocated on a fat pipe for running the porn sniffin' robot, among other things). I hope folks find it to be a nice alternative to the fascist tendencies of the proprietary blocking systems.
My company serves a lot of independent ISPs with our web caching appliances (Linux/Squid/Open Source, of course), and I've found that the ones that thrive are the ones who know their customers...even personally.
They do not try to be the lowest price in the market, and many even charge AOL style prices for their dial up service. But, they do everything they can to insure that their service 'feels' faster and better and friendlier. They always have a real person answer the phone. A lot of times it's a two or three man show--but they answer their phones when you call with a problem and they look into the problem right then and there--no trouble tickets, no "I'll email the tech department and let them know". They pursue business customers (but still treat their consumer customers as old friends), because of the much higher margins, and they know many of their clients by name (or they keep a database so at least they know of all of the old problems and complaints and issues the client has had).
As has been mentioned, small towns are still ripe for entry by ISPs. Even in the US. Several of our customers are doing great, and they are still the only ISP in their given market. The ones who are seeing competition are staying ahead of the curve by offering business and consumer wireless web service (the last great frontier of the ISP world--read some wireless ISP mailing lists for a really fun bunch of folks--erecting towers without licenses, installing broadband in the most bizarre places you can imagine, and overall working together in a beautiful coopetition banding together against the Bell's). Wireless broadband is very cool in that if you really want to, you can push as much as 11Mbits (usually only 2Mbits, however) across town.
And of course, I also think a good web cache is a great idea for a small ISP. Bigger ISPs may have bandwidth and money to burn, but the little guy has to save where he can--and provide better service to boot. The original post asked for prices...starts at $1500 for a build it yourself box running Squid--here's the directions:
Or you can buy one from us or other, proprietary vendors. Our Squid based appliances start at just under $2k to support up to two T1 lines, and there are quite a few other caching vendors who are quite happy to work with small ISPs. Stratacache is a Volera-based vendor that has some low-end options. The company seems to be run by good people, so is also a good choice if you don't mind a proprietary solution.
Just thought I'd chime in and say that I'm writing a Webmin module that will do all of these things (even allowing delegation of some things down to the client). Webmin already can provide a lot of neat stuff for the web hosting provider, if configured very carefully. I want to take the planning part out of the picture and make it fully automated, such that an administrator will simply enter a domain name, and everything else will be set up correctly--permissions, accounts, virts, mail aliases, etc.
It's for a new hardware product that we're developing, but it is free and GPL'ed.
Anyone with an interest in getting involved in development please email me (perl knowledge required). Apache virts work, users are created, and home directories are made, in the modules current form. The rest of the picture is adding a new Webmin user (with correct permissions), DNS, and Sendmail. Someone today recommended adding MySQL and PostgreSQL users, so it's on the todo for a later version. I haven't put up a website yet, but I'll do so immediately if other people want to get involved.
If you are the only user on your cache, then Squid is overkill (and resource hungry overkill at that). But if you have 2 or more users who will occasionally visit the same sites, then Squid is well worth implementing.
The benefit of Squid is not necessarily in it's method of caching, but that it caches everyone who proxies through it. The more users you have for your cache, the better it works. All of those users are there filling the cache every day with the sites they visit, so that the next time anyone of the network visits that site, it pops up instantly.
Also, since a dedicated Squid box will often have a lot more room (hundreds of megabytes or several gigabytes) of hard disk space and quite a bit of RAM devoted to the cache than the Netscape/IE cache on most single users systems, you get more effective caching.
In short, a dedicated proxy can do some nice things for you, like block ads, porn, whatever. Squid can also allow you to browse entirely offline (just put it into never_direct mode) as long as you've visited a page before. It generally does things as well as or better than the builtin cache of your browser.
In a small office, school, whatever, environment a squid box is just priceless. Saves bandwidth and makes things fast fast fast. But for one user, there really just isn't much point in it, unless you do have an overloaded workstation and you want to offload the caching job to a separate box. Then it makes perfect sense.
Yeah, we all hate Microsoft. I haven't seen a BSOD in two years and haven't missed it one bit. But really, do we want the government (the folks who brought us $900 hammers and $15,000 battle fax machines...not to mention Social Insecurity, national forests that get eaten by timber companies while we pay for the roads they drive on) deciding how businesses--especially technology companies--will be structured and organized?
Microsoft is already going to lose. All of us are making sure of that. Why let the government set the rules of this game? Whenever they do, the folks who line their pockets get the rules they want. It's just insanity to let government infringe on the industry that has made this country richer than it ever imagined it could be.
I don't like it. And I'm not convinced that this isn't going to open the door to even more regulation of the computer industry. Government people are never satiated. They start a feeding frenzy and don't stop until they've killed an industry (i.e. railroads in the US) or regulated it to a place where they hold all the cards (i.e. power, airlines, door to door letter mail, etc.).
Is that really where we want our industry to end up? Under the thumb of power hungry bureaucrats with no skill or knowledge except how to claw their way to the top of the Washington dung heap...
Do the purchasers of commercial time have "designated viewers" to watch and make sure the station really does live up to its end of the deal?
They might, but I doubt it. And they probably don't need to. The accounting of commercials is the leading IT expense for a TV station (they use enterprise class databases to keep up with it) and they take it very seriously.
Because advertisers are the absolute most important thing to a TV station, they cannot have a bad reputation with those advertisers. I can't speak for all stations, as I've only worked for one. But the policy at my station was really quite strict and quite strictly enforced.
If a commercial was missed, there would be a big effort to get it played during the same program (called a "make good"). The master control operator was given the leeway to drop onair promotions (i.e. commercials for our other programs or events that were sponsored by the station itself), cut part of the show (those two or three seconds of silence at the beginning and end of each segment), or shift the next show forward by a few seconds (or all of the above), in order to attempt to make good the missed spot.
Also, even if a spot plays, and looks or sounds bad on the air (i.e. the tape had developed a crease since it last aired, which doesn't happen anymore with the new hard disk based system, or the sound was out of phase), even if the problem is with the master the advertiser provided. If the operator making the dub didn't catch the problem, it gets a make good.
Finally, if the spot doesn't air during it's scheduled block (i.e. during Friends) then the advertiser may have a secondary spot that they will accept...if so it is rescheduled for that spot. If not, they are contacted and offered another spot in the same program the next day or next week. If they are mad enough they may want their money back, and they will get it.
Anyway...the answer to the question is...Advertisers probably don't have watchers, and if they do, it is probably an unnecessary expense unless they are advertising on one of the low quality stations (we've all seen them...indie stations where 80% of programming is infomercials and the rest is Kojak and Alf reruns). Of course, maybe most stations are rather lax, and the station I worked for (really quite strict on all things quality control related) was an exception. I can't really say with confidence.
In Indiana (and I presume the majority of northern states) ice storms and snow cause 4-days to be a sort of minimum amount of fuel.
Hehehe...Aint got no snow in Houston. We got floods, and sometimes tornados, but so far no snow.
But that's entirely reasonable for a place where snow is so common. The expense of storing the fuel on site would more than make up for the one time you had to shovel out a path to your tanks and pay for a deliver in those conditions.
Before going into networking, I worked in television (the technical end, not as a talking head). And I think broadcast television is about as practiced in power failure preparedness as anybody. I think ISP's and web hosts who want to claim high availability can learn a lot from TV.
Our policy was that all local vital functions were on UPS. This included the switcher, the master control tape machines, the NT boxen that handled the automation, the Unix boxen that served the advertisements, the microwave antenna that sent the signal over to the transmitter, one of the small satellite dishes, and probably a couple of things I'm not thinking of. Plus the building had backup power for emergency lights for about 6 hours (after that the flashlights came out...that only happened once during the 2 years before the big generator was installed).
When I started working there, the station itself had a small generator for vital functions that would come on after ~15 minutes of failed power. A couple years in, we installed a bigger generator that could handle most of the normal functions also. It was, I believe, an 800HP diesel generator with a fuel tank big enough for about 30 hours of operation with no power.
The transmitter (being a UHF station, which requires TONS of power) couldn't run off of a UPS because I don't think they make them big enough, but it had a generator that would automatically start every time there was a brownout and stay on until it was needed, or until the power returned to normal and stayed that way for about half an hour. However, whenever a big storm was coming the generator at the transmitter would be turned on by the engineer on duty and someone would drive out to be prepared in case the automatic switchover to generator power didn't go smoothly. (Those big transmitter tubes are pretty quirky...it doesn't take much to throw them offline. A big voltage spike can cause them to overheat and shutdown. And sometimes they drop offline just for the fun of it.)
The generator at the transmitter was a 1600HP diesel with enough fuel for 4 days (!) of uninterrupted operation with two tubes online (normally, we ran two video tubes and one aural tube at full power...when at half power, one video tube was dropped offline and the aural tube was run at half power). This fuel tank exuberance was, in the words of the Chief Engineer, "In case someone can't get out to the transmitter for a while...nuclear war and plagues of frogs do happen. We'd like to stay on the air."
Oh, yeah, the transmitter was also connected to two power grids via direct lines (not shared with any other buildings and contracted by the two TV stations that were on the tower). We had a direct phone number for a 24 hour on call power company technician, that could be called when power failed. The power company tends to pay attention when a company with multimillion dollar a year power bills calls.
This probably isn't representative of all TV stations, the station I worked at was in Houston...the 5th largest TV market in the US. But I'm sure most have similar plans and equipment, if not the same excess.
Just thought it might be of interest. I don't really know how network folks handle such big jobs. We've got UPS power for our vital machines and quality surge suppressors on the rest, and that answers our inhouse power needs OK.;-)
A funny, and interesting tidbit for those who stuck it out through this whole post: When a TV station must drop off the air for a few minutes at an unscheduled time (like maybe a tube is failing and needs to be switched out) it will be timed so that no commercials are missed. Now you know who the TV stations are looking out for.;-)
InformIT has just partnered with Cisco to create a website of Cisco information. I haven't plumbed the depths of the site, but it does look promising, though it does have the InformIT curse (here's 3 chapters, now give us a bunch of dough for the rest).
Maybe it's worth a look. The Cisco site also has a lot of the manuals for their hardware. Not as good as hands on by any means, but maybe worth a look.
Sounds like what you need is load balancing. There are a couple of good options for this.
The most popular these days is Layer 4 switching, which splits traffic as evenly as it can by monitoring the traffic on each pipe and directing requests accordingly. Linux Virtual Server can provide L4 switching capabilities from any old box you've got lying around.
Cisco also produces intelligent routers that can perform a sort of load balancing. Another option is a cache heirarchy using Squid. Squid can perform basic load balancing functions through it's parent/sibling relationship features.
Probably the best thing to do is set up LVS as an L4 switch to load balance between Squids (one squid per pipe), with the Squid sharing cached content information via cache digests.
Using an L4 switch + cache setup you will not only effectively share the bandwidth you will also get faster response times and less bandwidth usage overall.
http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org: Is the website to go to to find out about LVS. Also, the LVS kernel patches are now default in Red Hat 6.2 and above, plus Red Hat includes a web based administration frontend called Pirahna.
I'm posting quite late, but I figure someone might do a search and stumble onto this thread.
I finally recieved the second application from Charge.com for their "Secondary Processor". Strangely the application was from the same bank. Only this time, "Real Time Processing" cost $995 up front or you could lease it for 48 months at $14.95/month. That lease is unbreakable BTW. Real honest, upstanding business practices.
Looks like bait and switch in it's purest form to me. And here I thought I had found someone whose intentions were at least honest.
So, I hope no one wasted time on Charge.com. They've wasted quite enough of mine. I've taken my merchant services business elsewhere (not going to comment on where just yet, as I don't know if they are any more honest than Charge.com).
The law isn't entirely clear on whether you must or must not inform users, and it is different depending on the state you're in. Some states do hold that businesses own their networks absolutely and can do anything they want with the data passing through, but many states maintain a right to privacy. But most have not had any sort of case to test this, nor do they have laws that enumerate the rights of businesses and employees.
We always tell our clients to inform their users of just what kind of log monitoring they will be doing. Most network managers I've spoken to opt to not translate the IP addresses listed in access logs or even pay any attention to them, thus allowing action to be taken without pointing fingers or violating privacy. They just scan the logs for a few minutes each day to see if any obvious porno sites are being visited. If so, they block them and move on. This is what we recommend to folks if log analysis must be done for content control purposes. It saves you from worrying about legal concerns, and allows you to look your co-workers in the face without laughing at the thought of them staring slackjawed at Big Beautiful Hirsute Women.
There is really no good reason to go snooping on an individuals browsing habits, IMHO. If you don't feel they are doing their job, fire them. Don't worry about trying to babysit them into doing the job you hired them for.
Nonetheless, focusing on blocking alone can be a win if a business does find that non-network-literate users show a penchant for seeking out all that the net has to offer, even when there is a policy in place against it. I suppose this is common in low-wage, mostly manual labor businesses where job security doesn't mean so much.
Perhaps the ideal choice if site blocking is your primary concern is Squid Guard with the freely available block list available from the Squid Guard site.
Squid Guard is a redirector that works with Squid to provide a wide array of blocking and access control features. Pretty much anything you can envision doing (short of filtering the actual content) can be done with Squid and Squid Guard.
You provide it with a list of regular expressions or distinct URL's and it will block them according to rules you provide (i.e. executives have unlimited access, employess have no porn or games access, janitors only have acces to intranet sites, etc.).
Squid alone can provide URL based blocking and it works quite well. It's the method we recommend for most of our clients who need blocking simply because it's so easy. It's already built in, and you can download a pretty good blocklist called SquidBlock from here:
It's a little rough and the list requires a little hand tuning to make it really effective, but generally just plugs right in using the directions provided on the site.
Another option is Squirm, which is another redirector. I don't have any direct experience with it, but I assume it works pretty similar to Squid Guard above.
Any one of these should do the job. If it's the most important part of your proxies job, go the extra mile and install Squid Guard and hand tune the black list (or better still create a second user defined list, so you can install new downloaded blacklists periodically). It will do the job admirably.
If it's just a matter of being able to say to management, "Yes, we've got porn blocking in place...it works pretty well, and we're logging all accesses anyway...blah, blah, blah" you could use Squid alone with the SquidBlock list and keep an eye on your logs. This requires you to inform your users they may be watched though. But generally, we've found that a policy that clearly states the permissable uses (and the promise of log analysis) works better in most environments than blocking. Block lists just can't keep up with the number of porn sites. And it tends to keep the internet use more strictly focused on work rather than seeing what sites can be found that aren't yet blocked.
I guess I should point out that even if you use the better method (Squid Guard) and find it satisfactory, you will still need to monitor logs (although you can do so without caring about who is accessing what) to find any new sites that are being accessed that aren't yet blocked. Babysitting internet access is a pretty big job. You should do what you can to prevent users from even trying to circumvent the blocking to minimize you own labor.
Hope this helps. I'm available for questioning on this stuff (it's my job, so I know my way around Squid pretty good).
We've got a huge dining room table in our office that works really well and provides space for two 20" monitors (one at each end) plus space for a scanner and whatever rackmount unit I'm experimenting with at the moment. We opted to use both leaves and expand out to something like 58" (maybe longer I don't recall now...), but one person would have plenty of space on it without leaves.
I know it sounds strange but we got it for $75 at a garage sale, and it actually works better than the $400 desk I have at the house. It's actually the right height--I've found most desks to be way too low and I strain my neck looking down at the monitor all day.
It's nice and heavy duty (solid wood 1" thick) so I don't worry about piling all this heavy stuff on it. We were trying to figure out how we could fit everything we needed into our rather small office, and this fit the bill perfectly.
I do miss drawers somewhat, but it keeps me a little more organized not being able to pile papers into the middle drawer of my desk! And it looks really nice, to boot. Solid wood with a nice pretty finish and fancy antiquey looking legs.;-)
Just a thought. I think the lesson to be learned from this is: Give garage sales and flea markets a try! Sometimes you'll find just what you need. I would have probably built something myself if I didn't have such rich pickings at garage sales around my area.
While it's true that many drives in the past experienced problems due to thermal recalibration, most drives are now able to weather those monentary lapses without significant interruption to the data stream. Back in the day, I went out of my way (and paid the 20% premium) for AV drives, but I haven't had to bother when I bought my last few drives.
Multitrack audio is a hobby of mine, and I've found that with drives less than 2 years old, there are no problems with streaming huge amounts of uninterrupted data from non-AV drives.
In fact, I'm not even sure that many manufacturers still make a separate line called "AV" drives, anymore. Most have just improved their normal line to behave properly when streaming data. Not to mention that drives have gotten faster since the AV drives were so common. A single video stream at DVD quality is not difficult to sustain even from a UDMA 66 7200 RPM drive (which are dirt cheap these days).
I've applied for a merchant services account at Charge.com...but was turned down by their primary processor because I have zero credit. They offered to resubmit to a secondary processor. I haven't yet heard back on that one yet.
Advanced Merchant Services/Signio has very similar rates and claim to like small internet startups and people with little or no credit. I will contact them if the Charge.com application doesn't pan out. They are at www.merchant-accounts.com
When I started all of this I had no idea setting up merchant services was such a dirty business. I've come upon some of the nastiest business practices from merchant services folks. And a read through the contract of even the better ones (Charge and Signio being two of the best I've found) makes it clear that the merchant has ZERO rights. They claim the right to withold funds on a whim, make chargebacks with very little recourse, cancel at any time, change terms of the agreement at any time. Section 5.11 of the Charge.com contract even states that they have to right to refuse to accept payments beyond a certain approved amount or to withold those funds for an indefinite period. It's ludicrous.
If someone were to start an honest and fair payment services company that doesn't rely on the old-guard banks (where much of the crookedness comes from, I've found in my own research) they could make a killing. If you follow the ISP-ecommerce mailing list, you see nothing but complaints, charges of fraudulent behavior, and overall dissatisfied merchants.
At this point, merchant services is the only thing keeping us from going live on our website. And we've been waiting over a month now. (We started out talking to our banks, who made it clear that they wanted no truck with internet startup businesses.)
A sound card in it's most basic sense simply shoots some bits through a Digital to Analog convertor. There is no way this can be done "in software". As long as the method for sending data to these sound interfaces is available, (and even if it's not...a reverse enigineering job should be as easy as they come) there is nothing preventing sound drivers being written.
If you want 3D and reverb and whatever other shoddy DSP stuff they put into audio cards these days, then it is most likely not a feature built into the hardware. Good riddance, I say. A well written software solution is my preference any day.
Really, the only problem I foresee with these interfaces is that they might sound really bad. But maybe they'll be Ok. Regardless, if you do audio work you're going to need a proper sound card anyway, not anything that will come by default in a standard desktop PC. These days you can get an 8 channel 24/96 (24 bit 96kHz) board for under a grand. If you need great audio, professional quality is only a few bucks away. If you need sound for Quake ]|[ use your built in audio and enjoy.
In short, sound cards generally cannot be like "WinModems" because sound cards just aren't that complicated. If our heroes at ALSA can figure out how to talk to the card, it will work just fine.
Slashdot Mirror
I recall a few year back, this was discussed amongst GNU folks, and others as a mechanism to prevent proprietary vendors from locking 'us' (us being Open Source developers, users and businesses) out of important inventions.
I have only seen one 'iffy' thing ever come out of Red Hat (the RHN server, which is an in-house secret...though they appear to be helpful with the Current developers), so I tend to believe they have no intention of using this offensively against Open Source companies or users.
Besides, I seem to recall the GPL protects us against anyone integrating incompatibly licensed code into GPL software. TUX is part of the Linux kernel, thus it cannot be restricted or fees enforced on its use. Red Hat would have a bear of a time rewriting TUX independently of the kernel (Ingo could do it, of course), but the damage is done. Those inventions (and inventions they are...Ingo does really cool stuff, this isn't a one-click patent folks) are already in the development kernels. We (the community) already own these developments.
So, what I'm trying to say is:
Thank you very much, Ingo and Red Hat. I am very appreciative of the interesting inventions you have given to us. I forward to learning about them, using them, and enjoying the benefits they give us. And boy, that sure was clever of you to patent it, so that Microsoft will have a bit of trouble stepping on your toes in the future. Way to play hardball!
Matrox seems to be good too, as I've never had trouble getting their video boards to work right out of the box with X (as I understand it the Matrox folks are more helpful than most to the X developers).
That said, Promise is clearly bad for refusing to release their drivers in source form (I guess they think their software RAID technology is so advanced it would give their competitors a great benefit--or maybe they are embarassed to let us see it). Logitech have never been friendly to the OSS world about their QuickCam cameras. I think a lot of printer manufacturers have been a nuisance in this regard (I gave up on trying to figure it all out and bought a Postscript-capable network printer). I'd be curious about good and well supported inkjet printers, though...
Oh, yeah, our Microtek X6EL scanner works great with Linux and SANE. I don't know if the manufacturer is to be credited partially or if the driver author was just heroic in his efforts, but it works exceedingly well.
Then again, I've had my book available for free online since I wrote the first 30 pages or so. And I intend to keep the free version available after it is printed by No Starch in a couple of months. I guess I'm one of them weirdos who thinks content creators shouldn't extract money from their customers at every possible opportunity. I like musicians who sell their records for reasonable prices (Dischord records, That Dog before they split, etc.) and authors who don't really think everyone should have to pay $45 for their books (Bruce Eckel). I'm all for getting paid, and paying folks who have done the work, but I'm also for letting people decide if a work is worth shelling out the dough for.
I guess this Open Source thing has gotten to me. Or maybe it was the punk rock thing ("give the kids their moneys worth"). Regardless, prices on new books are probably higher than they ought to be, and if I often buy used ones if I can't get it new for a reasonable price--the new price always dictates whether I get it at my local Half Price Books or at BookPool.
That's my take on the issue anyway.
Pigeons searching the web? Where's the subtlety in that? Where's the surprise? The Slashdot bit was mildly entertaining, Freshmeat was just a groaner. There has to be surprise to really get a good laugh going, and I just wasn't surprised by these things. Maybe I'm jaded from reading them for too long and knowing what to expect from them.
Oh, well, I'll quit griping now. Maybe I'll go read the MaraDNS release announcement again. That'll put me in a better mood, I reckon.
Is this a troll? Really...You don't think that the Bells are naturally occurring monopoly, do you?
The Bell monopolies have never been natural. They have always been, and continue to be propped up by the government. They are the very crookedest kind of monopoly--the kind that is backed up by force, law, and the taxman. Who in their right mind would try to compete with a monopoly that has the backing of the entire US government behind it? (Hmmm...let's name the folks who tried: Covad, Rhythms, etc. etc. How are they doing these days? )
BTW-The Bells do not provide good service. My ADSL link through SWBell sucks. DNS is down weekly, mail service is intermittent at best, etc.
Unfortunately the government didn't keep their hands off of Enron...Enron's board of directors featured a number of quite large Republican supporters (where support==boatloads of money). Enron bought and paid for their government protection, and got it all the way til the end (and are still getting it today in the form of not going to jail for fraud).
I guess I didn't make it clear...The list will be entirely human edited. No bot generated entries will go into the list unchecked. That's what I get for posting about it before the "Philosophy" page goes up.
We (Swell Technology and a few brave volunteers) are starting a community generated and edited block list project called Penguin Feet which will be located at www.penguinfeet.org. The system will be free, easy to use, and based on GPLed tools, and the list will be publicly accessible at all times--and more importantly the project will be entirely accountable to the community that develops it. No more blocking Time magazine for running an anti-censorship article, no more blocking PeaceFire, no more blocking Amnesty International, or NOW. It will be about blocking those sites that are judged by a number of volunteer and paid editors to be inappropriate for young children. The goal is to provide a free content control system that is as effective as any proprietary system.
Anyone wanting to help out by being a contributor (search for porn and hate sites and submit them), and editor (look at the found porn and hate speech), a coder (database and perl knowledge needed), an integrator (SquidGuard+Squid is first, if you've got ideas for doing this on any other proxy contact me), or a skeptic (complain about sites that are blocked that shouldn't be) should contact us at penguinfeet@swelltech.com.
Anyway...We're about a month or two away from first launch (gotta get the database box colocated on a fat pipe for running the porn sniffin' robot, among other things). I hope folks find it to be a nice alternative to the fascist tendencies of the proprietary blocking systems.
They do not try to be the lowest price in the market, and many even charge AOL style prices for their dial up service. But, they do everything they can to insure that their service 'feels' faster and better and friendlier. They always have a real person answer the phone. A lot of times it's a two or three man show--but they answer their phones when you call with a problem and they look into the problem right then and there--no trouble tickets, no "I'll email the tech department and let them know". They pursue business customers (but still treat their consumer customers as old friends), because of the much higher margins, and they know many of their clients by name (or they keep a database so at least they know of all of the old problems and complaints and issues the client has had).
As has been mentioned, small towns are still ripe for entry by ISPs. Even in the US. Several of our customers are doing great, and they are still the only ISP in their given market. The ones who are seeing competition are staying ahead of the curve by offering business and consumer wireless web service (the last great frontier of the ISP world--read some wireless ISP mailing lists for a really fun bunch of folks--erecting towers without licenses, installing broadband in the most bizarre places you can imagine, and overall working together in a beautiful coopetition banding together against the Bell's). Wireless broadband is very cool in that if you really want to, you can push as much as 11Mbits (usually only 2Mbits, however) across town.
And of course, I also think a good web cache is a great idea for a small ISP. Bigger ISPs may have bandwidth and money to burn, but the little guy has to save where he can--and provide better service to boot. The original post asked for prices...starts at $1500 for a build it yourself box running Squid--here's the directions:
http://www.swelltech.com/pengies/joe/squidtuneup/t 1.html
Or you can buy one from us or other, proprietary vendors. Our Squid based appliances start at just under $2k to support up to two T1 lines, and there are quite a few other caching vendors who are quite happy to work with small ISPs. Stratacache is a Volera-based vendor that has some low-end options. The company seems to be run by good people, so is also a good choice if you don't mind a proprietary solution.
It's for a new hardware product that we're developing, but it is free and GPL'ed.
Anyone with an interest in getting involved in development please email me (perl knowledge required). Apache virts work, users are created, and home directories are made, in the modules current form. The rest of the picture is adding a new Webmin user (with correct permissions), DNS, and Sendmail. Someone today recommended adding MySQL and PostgreSQL users, so it's on the todo for a later version. I haven't put up a website yet, but I'll do so immediately if other people want to get involved.
Your trusty Marshall probably needs some new tubes anyway...so there you are, 4 big honkin' 12AX7s and a couple of dinky little fellows.
Just a thought...
The benefit of Squid is not necessarily in it's method of caching, but that it caches everyone who proxies through it. The more users you have for your cache, the better it works. All of those users are there filling the cache every day with the sites they visit, so that the next time anyone of the network visits that site, it pops up instantly.
Also, since a dedicated Squid box will often have a lot more room (hundreds of megabytes or several gigabytes) of hard disk space and quite a bit of RAM devoted to the cache than the Netscape/IE cache on most single users systems, you get more effective caching.
In short, a dedicated proxy can do some nice things for you, like block ads, porn, whatever. Squid can also allow you to browse entirely offline (just put it into never_direct mode) as long as you've visited a page before. It generally does things as well as or better than the builtin cache of your browser.
In a small office, school, whatever, environment a squid box is just priceless. Saves bandwidth and makes things fast fast fast. But for one user, there really just isn't much point in it, unless you do have an overloaded workstation and you want to offload the caching job to a separate box. Then it makes perfect sense.
Microsoft is already going to lose. All of us are making sure of that. Why let the government set the rules of this game? Whenever they do, the folks who line their pockets get the rules they want. It's just insanity to let government infringe on the industry that has made this country richer than it ever imagined it could be.
I don't like it. And I'm not convinced that this isn't going to open the door to even more regulation of the computer industry. Government people are never satiated. They start a feeding frenzy and don't stop until they've killed an industry (i.e. railroads in the US) or regulated it to a place where they hold all the cards (i.e. power, airlines, door to door letter mail, etc.).
Is that really where we want our industry to end up? Under the thumb of power hungry bureaucrats with no skill or knowledge except how to claw their way to the top of the Washington dung heap...
It's not where I want us to be.
They might, but I doubt it. And they probably don't need to. The accounting of commercials is the leading IT expense for a TV station (they use enterprise class databases to keep up with it) and they take it very seriously.
Because advertisers are the absolute most important thing to a TV station, they cannot have a bad reputation with those advertisers. I can't speak for all stations, as I've only worked for one. But the policy at my station was really quite strict and quite strictly enforced.
If a commercial was missed, there would be a big effort to get it played during the same program (called a "make good"). The master control operator was given the leeway to drop onair promotions (i.e. commercials for our other programs or events that were sponsored by the station itself), cut part of the show (those two or three seconds of silence at the beginning and end of each segment), or shift the next show forward by a few seconds (or all of the above), in order to attempt to make good the missed spot.
Also, even if a spot plays, and looks or sounds bad on the air (i.e. the tape had developed a crease since it last aired, which doesn't happen anymore with the new hard disk based system, or the sound was out of phase), even if the problem is with the master the advertiser provided. If the operator making the dub didn't catch the problem, it gets a make good.
Finally, if the spot doesn't air during it's scheduled block (i.e. during Friends) then the advertiser may have a secondary spot that they will accept...if so it is rescheduled for that spot. If not, they are contacted and offered another spot in the same program the next day or next week. If they are mad enough they may want their money back, and they will get it.
Anyway...the answer to the question is...Advertisers probably don't have watchers, and if they do, it is probably an unnecessary expense unless they are advertising on one of the low quality stations (we've all seen them...indie stations where 80% of programming is infomercials and the rest is Kojak and Alf reruns). Of course, maybe most stations are rather lax, and the station I worked for (really quite strict on all things quality control related) was an exception. I can't really say with confidence.
Hehehe...Aint got no snow in Houston. We got floods, and sometimes tornados, but so far no snow.
But that's entirely reasonable for a place where snow is so common. The expense of storing the fuel on site would more than make up for the one time you had to shovel out a path to your tanks and pay for a deliver in those conditions.
Our policy was that all local vital functions were on UPS. This included the switcher, the master control tape machines, the NT boxen that handled the automation, the Unix boxen that served the advertisements, the microwave antenna that sent the signal over to the transmitter, one of the small satellite dishes, and probably a couple of things I'm not thinking of. Plus the building had backup power for emergency lights for about 6 hours (after that the flashlights came out...that only happened once during the 2 years before the big generator was installed).
When I started working there, the station itself had a small generator for vital functions that would come on after ~15 minutes of failed power. A couple years in, we installed a bigger generator that could handle most of the normal functions also. It was, I believe, an 800HP diesel generator with a fuel tank big enough for about 30 hours of operation with no power.
The transmitter (being a UHF station, which requires TONS of power) couldn't run off of a UPS because I don't think they make them big enough, but it had a generator that would automatically start every time there was a brownout and stay on until it was needed, or until the power returned to normal and stayed that way for about half an hour. However, whenever a big storm was coming the generator at the transmitter would be turned on by the engineer on duty and someone would drive out to be prepared in case the automatic switchover to generator power didn't go smoothly. (Those big transmitter tubes are pretty quirky...it doesn't take much to throw them offline. A big voltage spike can cause them to overheat and shutdown. And sometimes they drop offline just for the fun of it.)
The generator at the transmitter was a 1600HP diesel with enough fuel for 4 days (!) of uninterrupted operation with two tubes online (normally, we ran two video tubes and one aural tube at full power...when at half power, one video tube was dropped offline and the aural tube was run at half power). This fuel tank exuberance was, in the words of the Chief Engineer, "In case someone can't get out to the transmitter for a while...nuclear war and plagues of frogs do happen. We'd like to stay on the air."
Oh, yeah, the transmitter was also connected to two power grids via direct lines (not shared with any other buildings and contracted by the two TV stations that were on the tower). We had a direct phone number for a 24 hour on call power company technician, that could be called when power failed. The power company tends to pay attention when a company with multimillion dollar a year power bills calls.
This probably isn't representative of all TV stations, the station I worked at was in Houston...the 5th largest TV market in the US. But I'm sure most have similar plans and equipment, if not the same excess.
Just thought it might be of interest. I don't really know how network folks handle such big jobs. We've got UPS power for our vital machines and quality surge suppressors on the rest, and that answers our inhouse power needs OK. ;-)
A funny, and interesting tidbit for those who stuck it out through this whole post: When a TV station must drop off the air for a few minutes at an unscheduled time (like maybe a tube is failing and needs to be switched out) it will be timed so that no commercials are missed. Now you know who the TV stations are looking out for. ;-)
http://www.knowcisco.com/
Maybe it's worth a look. The Cisco site also has a lot of the manuals for their hardware. Not as good as hands on by any means, but maybe worth a look.
The most popular these days is Layer 4 switching, which splits traffic as evenly as it can by monitoring the traffic on each pipe and directing requests accordingly. Linux Virtual Server can provide L4 switching capabilities from any old box you've got lying around.
Cisco also produces intelligent routers that can perform a sort of load balancing. Another option is a cache heirarchy using Squid. Squid can perform basic load balancing functions through it's parent/sibling relationship features.
Probably the best thing to do is set up LVS as an L4 switch to load balance between Squids (one squid per pipe), with the Squid sharing cached content information via cache digests.
Using an L4 switch + cache setup you will not only effectively share the bandwidth you will also get faster response times and less bandwidth usage overall.
http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org: Is the website to go to to find out about LVS. Also, the LVS kernel patches are now default in Red Hat 6.2 and above, plus Red Hat includes a web based administration frontend called Pirahna.
http://www.squid-cache.org: The Squid homepage.
Hope this helps.
I finally recieved the second application from Charge.com for their "Secondary Processor". Strangely the application was from the same bank. Only this time, "Real Time Processing" cost $995 up front or you could lease it for 48 months at $14.95/month. That lease is unbreakable BTW. Real honest, upstanding business practices.
Looks like bait and switch in it's purest form to me. And here I thought I had found someone whose intentions were at least honest.
So, I hope no one wasted time on Charge.com. They've wasted quite enough of mine. I've taken my merchant services business elsewhere (not going to comment on where just yet, as I don't know if they are any more honest than Charge.com).
We always tell our clients to inform their users of just what kind of log monitoring they will be doing. Most network managers I've spoken to opt to not translate the IP addresses listed in access logs or even pay any attention to them, thus allowing action to be taken without pointing fingers or violating privacy. They just scan the logs for a few minutes each day to see if any obvious porno sites are being visited. If so, they block them and move on. This is what we recommend to folks if log analysis must be done for content control purposes. It saves you from worrying about legal concerns, and allows you to look your co-workers in the face without laughing at the thought of them staring slackjawed at Big Beautiful Hirsute Women.
There is really no good reason to go snooping on an individuals browsing habits, IMHO. If you don't feel they are doing their job, fire them. Don't worry about trying to babysit them into doing the job you hired them for.
Nonetheless, focusing on blocking alone can be a win if a business does find that non-network-literate users show a penchant for seeking out all that the net has to offer, even when there is a policy in place against it. I suppose this is common in low-wage, mostly manual labor businesses where job security doesn't mean so much.
Perhaps the ideal choice if site blocking is your primary concern is Squid Guard with the freely available block list available from the Squid Guard site.
http://www.squidguard.org
Squid Guard is a redirector that works with Squid to provide a wide array of blocking and access control features. Pretty much anything you can envision doing (short of filtering the actual content) can be done with Squid and Squid Guard.
You provide it with a list of regular expressions or distinct URL's and it will block them according to rules you provide (i.e. executives have unlimited access, employess have no porn or games access, janitors only have acces to intranet sites, etc.).
Squid alone can provide URL based blocking and it works quite well. It's the method we recommend for most of our clients who need blocking simply because it's so easy. It's already built in, and you can download a pretty good blocklist called SquidBlock from here:
http://www.hklc.com/squidblock/
It's a little rough and the list requires a little hand tuning to make it really effective, but generally just plugs right in using the directions provided on the site.
Another option is Squirm, which is another redirector. I don't have any direct experience with it, but I assume it works pretty similar to Squid Guard above.
http://www.senet.com.au/squirm/
Any one of these should do the job. If it's the most important part of your proxies job, go the extra mile and install Squid Guard and hand tune the black list (or better still create a second user defined list, so you can install new downloaded blacklists periodically). It will do the job admirably.
If it's just a matter of being able to say to management, "Yes, we've got porn blocking in place...it works pretty well, and we're logging all accesses anyway...blah, blah, blah" you could use Squid alone with the SquidBlock list and keep an eye on your logs. This requires you to inform your users they may be watched though. But generally, we've found that a policy that clearly states the permissable uses (and the promise of log analysis) works better in most environments than blocking. Block lists just can't keep up with the number of porn sites. And it tends to keep the internet use more strictly focused on work rather than seeing what sites can be found that aren't yet blocked.
I guess I should point out that even if you use the better method (Squid Guard) and find it satisfactory, you will still need to monitor logs (although you can do so without caring about who is accessing what) to find any new sites that are being accessed that aren't yet blocked. Babysitting internet access is a pretty big job. You should do what you can to prevent users from even trying to circumvent the blocking to minimize you own labor.
Hope this helps. I'm available for questioning on this stuff (it's my job, so I know my way around Squid pretty good).
I know it sounds strange but we got it for $75 at a garage sale, and it actually works better than the $400 desk I have at the house. It's actually the right height--I've found most desks to be way too low and I strain my neck looking down at the monitor all day.
It's nice and heavy duty (solid wood 1" thick) so I don't worry about piling all this heavy stuff on it. We were trying to figure out how we could fit everything we needed into our rather small office, and this fit the bill perfectly.
I do miss drawers somewhat, but it keeps me a little more organized not being able to pile papers into the middle drawer of my desk! And it looks really nice, to boot. Solid wood with a nice pretty finish and fancy antiquey looking legs. ;-)
Just a thought. I think the lesson to be learned from this is: Give garage sales and flea markets a try! Sometimes you'll find just what you need. I would have probably built something myself if I didn't have such rich pickings at garage sales around my area.
Multitrack audio is a hobby of mine, and I've found that with drives less than 2 years old, there are no problems with streaming huge amounts of uninterrupted data from non-AV drives.
In fact, I'm not even sure that many manufacturers still make a separate line called "AV" drives, anymore. Most have just improved their normal line to behave properly when streaming data. Not to mention that drives have gotten faster since the AV drives were so common. A single video stream at DVD quality is not difficult to sustain even from a UDMA 66 7200 RPM drive (which are dirt cheap these days).
Advanced Merchant Services/Signio has very similar rates and claim to like small internet startups and people with little or no credit. I will contact them if the Charge.com application doesn't pan out. They are at www.merchant-accounts.com
When I started all of this I had no idea setting up merchant services was such a dirty business. I've come upon some of the nastiest business practices from merchant services folks. And a read through the contract of even the better ones (Charge and Signio being two of the best I've found) makes it clear that the merchant has ZERO rights. They claim the right to withold funds on a whim, make chargebacks with very little recourse, cancel at any time, change terms of the agreement at any time. Section 5.11 of the Charge.com contract even states that they have to right to refuse to accept payments beyond a certain approved amount or to withold those funds for an indefinite period. It's ludicrous.
If someone were to start an honest and fair payment services company that doesn't rely on the old-guard banks (where much of the crookedness comes from, I've found in my own research) they could make a killing. If you follow the ISP-ecommerce mailing list, you see nothing but complaints, charges of fraudulent behavior, and overall dissatisfied merchants.
At this point, merchant services is the only thing keeping us from going live on our website. And we've been waiting over a month now. (We started out talking to our banks, who made it clear that they wanted no truck with internet startup businesses.)
It's really a rather disgusting business.
If you want 3D and reverb and whatever other shoddy DSP stuff they put into audio cards these days, then it is most likely not a feature built into the hardware. Good riddance, I say. A well written software solution is my preference any day.
Really, the only problem I foresee with these interfaces is that they might sound really bad. But maybe they'll be Ok. Regardless, if you do audio work you're going to need a proper sound card anyway, not anything that will come by default in a standard desktop PC. These days you can get an 8 channel 24/96 (24 bit 96kHz) board for under a grand. If you need great audio, professional quality is only a few bucks away. If you need sound for Quake ]|[ use your built in audio and enjoy.
In short, sound cards generally cannot be like "WinModems" because sound cards just aren't that complicated. If our heroes at ALSA can figure out how to talk to the card, it will work just fine.