It's called South Park, on Comedy Central every week or two....except for the fact that the execs pussed-out on the Mohamed episode, probably because they didn't want to deal with the beheading, bombings, riots, and other Muslim/Islamic childish tantrums over a cartoon.
I did get my OLPC XO. I bought it the first day the you can order via the buy-one-get-one program. I received it some time back in late December. I showed it around the office, to some friends, and gave it a good shake down test. It was impressive and I thought was fairly well designed.
I would encourage others who have received XOs and don't know what to do with them to do similar. Find a developer or someone who can really use it, and then give it away. Otherwise, contribute to the cause by helping with educational programs, improving the code, or writing documentation. Porting Doom, writing a new MP3 player, or bitching about performance is not helping.
It is not a general-use laptop. It's an educational tool. I don't think most Slashdot readers understand that.
That could be your problem right there. When a specific technology or whoop-do-doo product is pushed from the top down, rather than the bottom up, it's a problem. That's not the same as management saying "Get this done", so much as it's "Use this fancy thingy I read about in the newspaper... who cares what it does or if there is something better, I'm the decider!"
I had to throw my mee-too in. I worked as a contractor at a hospital and had pretty poor experiences with the crappy hospital industry software, including McKesson's. My interactions with their company proved their stupidity. Applying patches to their software was truly painful.
You are correct, but if Qwest refuses them access, then Covad is SOL. Also, where is Covad going to put a DSLAM? In a Qwest POP, usually. No access, no DSLAM. I'm not sure where the FCC currently is on the issue of CLECs having access to the ILECs network. It seems to flip flop around, but I'm pretty sure it's on the side of Qwest right now. As for Cox, they don't let anyone touch their stuff.
I'd just like a nice little pull box between each home and the block corner, where it can be aggregated. However, this is probably more difficult than it sounds. I don't know -- I'm not an outside plant person.
I'm sold on paying a little more for an ethical network operator, but they really can't deliver on their promise. This is because they don't own the hardware transport. And, ultimately, if the monopolies (both cable and telco) want to twiddle with my bits, they can do so all the way down to layer 1.
Right now I have Qwest DSL in very-downtown Phoenix Arizona. I'm literally two blocks from the local baseball park. The only ISP options that I have are Qwest with an 7Mbps down/800Kbps up ADSL line or Cox with a 10Mbps down/1Mbps up DOCSIS cable line. That's the best that America can do in a major metro area, which is pretty crappy. I'm more unhappy with the upload than download. Covad just *might* have a DSLAM somewhere nearby, but they would still have to lease Qwest's copper 24 gauge pairs.
You see, nobody else can own the lines that come to my home, and neither Qwest nor Cox are going to turn over their copper line that they buried for anything short of a court order. Other possible means of a communication media might be wireless radio, power lines, or (in the very-imaginative but more-possible-than-you-might-think spectrum), flushing a fiber optic line all the way down to the sewer system where it could be aggregated to some central point.
ATM is a real technology that has the possibilities of taking that layer two connection and making it portable, rendering the layer 1 less relevant, but ATM is a train wreck of a technology. It works for some of Asia, where it is popular, but it's a really horrible standard. Unfortunately, ATM has really gone to hell in the USA. This is mostly due to the fault of the equipment manufactures who could not deliver reasonably priced hardware and software, the ATM specifications horrible requirements (cell overhead, the need for hardware switching, and the horrific unnecessarily-complicated standards), and the resulting bad taste left with network admins/engineers like myself who just don't think of it as viable any longer.
In summary, I'm still screwed. I can't use BitTorrent for legit or illegal usage without having my rate limited and I can't serve up a decent website because of a crappy upload speed.
This is the answer, very simply put. It's the Exchange, stupid. This poster is very very wise.
I'd give my opinion at the cause being lack of project guidance or lack of individual commitment to a project. People get bored and want to start doing something else (Another damn audio player?), so a cool project stops progressing. Alternatively, a project doesn't have proper guidance and you get your typical stale blob of a project that tries to go all over the place but doesn't really get anywhere.
I work for a mid-sized business; four locations with about 500 employees.
We use Avaya (formerly known as lucent, formerly known as AT&T) phone systems. They are truly awesome -- in a not-good-at-all way. I am the primary administrator (UNIX background, not old-fart-telecom background).
So first we bought them, paying thousands and thousands of dollars, but now we have to RENT them too. You see, you pay a maintenance fee every month that works out to something like $8,000. If we stop paying, it's Avaya's policy that they will dial into our phone systems and cripple them so that we can't use about half of the command set. No, I'm not kidding -- they've done it to us by mistake and they are being sued over it in other states.
What do we get out of it? Not much. If some of our server hardware breaks, then Avaya will replace it, but Avaya won't assist with programming unless we pay them something like $80/hour for assistance. Given that a 24-port digital line card costs as little as $3K from authorized resellers, and we've never had one break, we would be much better off just hording our cash and buying a couple of spare cards and parts.
Unfortunately, Avaya also has a tight control over their supplier market. They have "authorized resellers" and then the SCARY "GRAY MARKET" oooooohhhhh BE SCARED!!! It's also known as eBay, where part prices are roughly 1/3rd of the cheapest Avaya authorized-monopolistic reseller.
Our sales person reminds me of a used auto salesmen.
Subscription services usually suck when it comes to software. Be warned.
I don't recommend you buy an XBox 360. In fact, I recommend against it.
That's because I own one. I bought it about two months ago.
I had read about the problems with overheating, the unit being loud, and it's fragility. But, I wanted to play a few games. So, I bought the console, Viva Pinta, and Gears Of War. It cost me well over $600.00. This was just after they announced that they would warranty the console for 1 year, rather than the pitiful and embarrassing 90 days that they would previously warrantee their hardware against defects.
I like both games, and the wireless controllers are really good, but the console hardware has problems.
I was very surprised and disappointed at just how loud and hot the console got. It's so loud that you either need to cover it inside of a cabinet or just put up with not being able to hear your own TV/speakers over the cooling fans.
Crashing is also a problem. I have to turn on the air cooler in my home before I start playing, or the console will crash. I learned this after it started getting warm this summer. I don't think I can ever recall a console crashing on me before Microsoft got into the business -- even the original XBox was trouble free for me.
I can't really do anything to fix the situation. But, I can warn you, potential buyer, to try the Wii instead. It's cheaper, stable, quiet, and now has just about as many quality games as XBox 360 has.
I'd really love to be wrong about the XBox 360, but you can't ignore the countless flood of legitimate complaints from owners.
Wow, this like what my 1993 SparcStation 10 can do. You have a single CPU unit with multiple framebuffers, thus allowing for up to four sets of monitors, keyboards, and mice.
I envision this as the only practical use of this technology; The ability to share a single computer between four office cubes of call-center workers, each with their own monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
As others have mentioned, the Nintendo DS only supports WEP, and that is a serious problem. Mostly, it's serious because most consumer wireless access points will only support a single type of encryption at a time.
I have two physical WAPs, one just for DS, and one for everything else. It's a problem. Nintedo needs to take some flack before they are going to realize that they screwed up.
There probably isn't anything that can be done to fix their product.
Try Smultron
on
TextMate
·
· Score: 2, Informative
There is an open source text editor for OS X called Smulton. I've been using it for awhile. It's a bit lean on features, but it is free.
I just donated $250 to the EFF (http://www.eff.org) and told them about this story.
You can post on Slashdot. Maybe someone will read it. Probably, nobody will care. Certainly, no congresscritter is going to care about your blithering post on slashdot.
Or you can put your money where your thoughts are and help this guy by sending money to the EFF and asking them to help him in his battle.
Stop terrorism in the USA! Kick buffoons like Congr-ASS-man Markey out of office and to the unemployment line.
GAIM has definitely gone onto my poop-list of an OSS project gone downhill. The MSN crash problem was probably what really tipped my opinion, after a very very long period of no updates or releases. They didn't actually fix this problem -- they told people that they fixed it in the 2.0 BETA, and never fixed it in the 1.x releases. So, basically, GAIM 1.x has gone unsupported on the Windows platform. Great. Thanks.
My other big gripe is the annoying messages that Trillian users get when they communicate with GAIM users -- a warning about using an outdated client protocol.
I use Cacti too, both for personal use as well as at the workplace. We monitor Cisco routers, Linux systems, Windows systems, Network Appliance Storage Filers, Cisco PIX firewalls, and a few other miscellaneous things. At a previous employer of mine, we had about 200 different devices being polled.
You can write your own scripts to poll items via the command line or SNMP, and then create your graph templates to draw the graphs the way you want.
One of the best features about Cacti is that you can create templates for graphs and data sources, and export them for others to use.
Cacti still needs some work, but it's a pretty good product for free. Releases in the last year has been slow, but I think that is because of a development efforts to a major future version change.
Other tools that I have heard about are jffnms and zabbix, though I have used neither.
I'm down with the eraserpoint/trackpoint. I definitely prefer it. I was very unhappy when Dell removed it from most of their Inspiron line of laptops some years back.
Why does it occur to me that spy agencies such as the NSA/FBI/CIA are happy about this because they can claim that the Internet is the network of a foreign body and so are not bound by wiretapping laws?
Slashdot Mirror
It's called South Park, on Comedy Central every week or two. ...except for the fact that the execs pussed-out on the Mohamed episode, probably because they didn't want to deal with the beheading, bombings, riots, and other Muslim/Islamic childish tantrums over a cartoon.
That's great, it'll be like Rambus. We all remember how great that was.
I did get my OLPC XO. I bought it the first day the you can order via the buy-one-get-one program. I received it some time back in late December. I showed it around the office, to some friends, and gave it a good shake down test. It was impressive and I thought was fairly well designed.
Then, I gave it away;
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-January/009361.html
I would encourage others who have received XOs and don't know what to do with them to do similar. Find a developer or someone who can really use it, and then give it away. Otherwise, contribute to the cause by helping with educational programs, improving the code, or writing documentation. Porting Doom, writing a new MP3 player, or bitching about performance is not helping.
It is not a general-use laptop. It's an educational tool. I don't think most Slashdot readers understand that.
"when CIOs deploy a new technology"
That could be your problem right there. When a specific technology or whoop-do-doo product is pushed from the top down, rather than the bottom up, it's a problem. That's not the same as management saying "Get this done", so much as it's "Use this fancy thingy I read about in the newspaper... who cares what it does or if there is something better, I'm the decider!"
I had to throw my mee-too in. I worked as a contractor at a hospital and had pretty poor experiences with the crappy hospital industry software, including McKesson's. My interactions with their company proved their stupidity. Applying patches to their software was truly painful.
Won't buy, won't play, have a nice day.
I was looking forward to buying this game, but then I heard about the DRM.
I looked to see if Steam had a version that wasn't infected, but it was too.
I'll pass on this game. There are others.
You are correct, but if Qwest refuses them access, then Covad is SOL. Also, where is Covad going to put a DSLAM? In a Qwest POP, usually. No access, no DSLAM.
I'm not sure where the FCC currently is on the issue of CLECs having access to the ILECs network. It seems to flip flop around, but I'm pretty sure it's on the side of Qwest right now. As for Cox, they don't let anyone touch their stuff.
I'd just like a nice little pull box between each home and the block corner, where it can be aggregated. However, this is probably more difficult than it sounds. I don't know -- I'm not an outside plant person.
I'm sold on paying a little more for an ethical network operator, but they really can't deliver on their promise. This is because they don't own the hardware transport. And, ultimately, if the monopolies (both cable and telco) want to twiddle with my bits, they can do so all the way down to layer 1.
Right now I have Qwest DSL in very-downtown Phoenix Arizona. I'm literally two blocks from the local baseball park. The only ISP options that I have are Qwest with an 7Mbps down/800Kbps up ADSL line or Cox with a 10Mbps down/1Mbps up DOCSIS cable line. That's the best that America can do in a major metro area, which is pretty crappy. I'm more unhappy with the upload than download. Covad just *might* have a DSLAM somewhere nearby, but they would still have to lease Qwest's copper 24 gauge pairs.
You see, nobody else can own the lines that come to my home, and neither Qwest nor Cox are going to turn over their copper line that they buried for anything short of a court order. Other possible means of a communication media might be wireless radio, power lines, or (in the very-imaginative but more-possible-than-you-might-think spectrum), flushing a fiber optic line all the way down to the sewer system where it could be aggregated to some central point.
ATM is a real technology that has the possibilities of taking that layer two connection and making it portable, rendering the layer 1 less relevant, but ATM is a train wreck of a technology. It works for some of Asia, where it is popular, but it's a really horrible standard. Unfortunately, ATM has really gone to hell in the USA. This is mostly due to the fault of the equipment manufactures who could not deliver reasonably priced hardware and software, the ATM specifications horrible requirements (cell overhead, the need for hardware switching, and the horrific unnecessarily-complicated standards), and the resulting bad taste left with network admins/engineers like myself who just don't think of it as viable any longer.
In summary, I'm still screwed. I can't use BitTorrent for legit or illegal usage without having my rate limited and I can't serve up a decent website because of a crappy upload speed.
http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
It has support specifically for laptops.
This is the answer, very simply put. It's the Exchange, stupid. This poster is very very wise.
I'd give my opinion at the cause being lack of project guidance or lack of individual commitment to a project. People get bored and want to start doing something else (Another damn audio player?), so a cool project stops progressing. Alternatively, a project doesn't have proper guidance and you get your typical stale blob of a project that tries to go all over the place but doesn't really get anywhere.
I work for a mid-sized business; four locations with about 500 employees.
We use Avaya (formerly known as lucent, formerly known as AT&T) phone systems. They are truly awesome -- in a not-good-at-all way. I am the primary administrator (UNIX background, not old-fart-telecom background).
So first we bought them, paying thousands and thousands of dollars, but now we have to RENT them too. You see, you pay a maintenance fee every month that works out to something like $8,000. If we stop paying, it's Avaya's policy that they will dial into our phone systems and cripple them so that we can't use about half of the command set. No, I'm not kidding -- they've done it to us by mistake and they are being sued over it in other states.
What do we get out of it? Not much. If some of our server hardware breaks, then Avaya will replace it, but Avaya won't assist with programming unless we pay them something like $80/hour for assistance. Given that a 24-port digital line card costs as little as $3K from authorized resellers, and we've never had one break, we would be much better off just hording our cash and buying a couple of spare cards and parts.
Unfortunately, Avaya also has a tight control over their supplier market. They have "authorized resellers" and then the SCARY "GRAY MARKET" oooooohhhhh BE SCARED!!! It's also known as eBay, where part prices are roughly 1/3rd of the cheapest Avaya authorized-monopolistic reseller.
Our sales person reminds me of a used auto salesmen.
Subscription services usually suck when it comes to software. Be warned.
I don't recommend you buy an XBox 360. In fact, I recommend against it.
That's because I own one. I bought it about two months ago.
I had read about the problems with overheating, the unit being loud, and it's fragility. But, I wanted to play a few games. So, I bought the console, Viva Pinta, and Gears Of War. It cost me well over $600.00. This was just after they announced that they would warranty the console for 1 year, rather than the pitiful and embarrassing 90 days that they would previously warrantee their hardware against defects.
I like both games, and the wireless controllers are really good, but the console hardware has problems.
I was very surprised and disappointed at just how loud and hot the console got. It's so loud that you either need to cover it inside of a cabinet or just put up with not being able to hear your own TV/speakers over the cooling fans.
Crashing is also a problem. I have to turn on the air cooler in my home before I start playing, or the console will crash. I learned this after it started getting warm this summer. I don't think I can ever recall a console crashing on me before Microsoft got into the business -- even the original XBox was trouble free for me.
I can't really do anything to fix the situation. But, I can warn you, potential buyer, to try the Wii instead. It's cheaper, stable, quiet, and now has just about as many quality games as XBox 360 has.
I'd really love to be wrong about the XBox 360, but you can't ignore the countless flood of legitimate complaints from owners.
What phone system are you using? I'd be interested in knowing.
Wow, this like what my 1993 SparcStation 10 can do. You have a single CPU unit with multiple framebuffers, thus allowing for up to four sets of monitors, keyboards, and mice.
I envision this as the only practical use of this technology; The ability to share a single computer between four office cubes of call-center workers, each with their own monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
As others have mentioned, the Nintendo DS only supports WEP, and that is a serious problem. Mostly, it's serious because most consumer wireless access points will only support a single type of encryption at a time.
I have two physical WAPs, one just for DS, and one for everything else. It's a problem. Nintedo needs to take some flack before they are going to realize that they screwed up.
There probably isn't anything that can be done to fix their product.
There is an open source text editor for OS X called Smulton. I've been using it for awhile. It's a bit lean on features, but it is free.
http://smultron.sourceforge.net/
On Windows, I use PSPad (Free) or UltraEdit (Commercial). The only thing I know of on GNU/Linux is BlueFish and SciTe.
I just donated $250 to the EFF (http://www.eff.org) and told them about this story.
You can post on Slashdot. Maybe someone will read it. Probably, nobody will care. Certainly, no congresscritter is going to care about your blithering post on slashdot.
Or you can put your money where your thoughts are and help this guy by sending money to the EFF and asking them to help him in his battle.
Stop terrorism in the USA! Kick buffoons like Congr-ASS-man Markey out of office and to the unemployment line.
GAIM has definitely gone onto my poop-list of an OSS project gone downhill. The MSN crash problem was probably what really tipped my opinion, after a very very long period of no updates or releases. They didn't actually fix this problem -- they told people that they fixed it in the 2.0 BETA, and never fixed it in the 1.x releases. So, basically, GAIM 1.x has gone unsupported on the Windows platform. Great. Thanks.
My other big gripe is the annoying messages that Trillian users get when they communicate with GAIM users -- a warning about using an outdated client protocol.
Reminds me of the Panzer Dragoon series of games. Very interesting storyline.
I use Cacti too, both for personal use as well as at the workplace. We monitor Cisco routers, Linux systems, Windows systems, Network Appliance Storage Filers, Cisco PIX firewalls, and a few other miscellaneous things. At a previous employer of mine, we had about 200 different devices being polled.
You can write your own scripts to poll items via the command line or SNMP, and then create your graph templates to draw the graphs the way you want.
One of the best features about Cacti is that you can create templates for graphs and data sources, and export them for others to use.
Cacti still needs some work, but it's a pretty good product for free. Releases in the last year has been slow, but I think that is because of a development efforts to a major future version change.
Other tools that I have heard about are jffnms and zabbix, though I have used neither.
I'm down with the eraserpoint/trackpoint. I definitely prefer it. I was very unhappy when Dell removed it from most of their Inspiron line of laptops some years back.
Why does it occur to me that spy agencies such as the NSA/FBI/CIA are happy about this because they can claim that the Internet is the network of a foreign body and so are not bound by wiretapping laws?
Who's thinkin blipverts?
Max Headroom: We're getting there.
You want noscript. It's an addon. I'm using it under Seamonkey.
http://www.noscript.net/