Look into Puppet or CFEngine (we use CFEngine but am considering switching to Puppet eventually). They're both extremely flexible management tools that will trivially handle package management, but you can use them to accomplish almost any management task you can imagine, with the ability to manage or edit any file you want, running shell scripts, etc.
The work flow goes something like this:
1. Identify packages that need update (have a cron job run on every box to email you packages that need updating, or just security updates, however you want to do it)
2. Update the desired versions in your local checkout of your cfengine/puppet files (the syntax isn't easily described here, but its very simple to learn).
3. Commit/push (note that this is the easy way to have multiple administrators) your changes. Optionally have a post commit hook to update a "master files" location, or just do the version control directly in that location.
4. Every box has an (hourly? Whatever you like) cron job to update against your master files location. At this time (with splay so you don't hammer your network) each cfengine/puppet client connects to the master server, updates any packages, configs, etc, runs any scripts you associated with those updates, then emails (or for extra credit build your own webapp) you the results.
You might be interested in the Touch Book from Always Innovating. At this point they're only taking pre-orders, but it definitely looks pretty neat. The keyboard is optional and detachable, so its not really "built in", but it gives you a good compromise between netbook and tablet, and its ARM based and cheap. I'm sure people will have Android going on it within days of release, as its basically a Beagle Board (which Android already runs on) with a touchscreen.
Re:This is the future..
on
Robotic Penguins
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
While I agree with you in principle, have you ever actually seen a penguin in nature?
if a student set up a service where they sold copies of their class work for... educators to buy copies to identify those students attempting to copy, then Turnitin would be directly infringing on their copyright.
Both the original Rainbow Six games as well as Ghost Recon do exactly that. But they're both somewhat more realism/simulation-oriented than your average action shooter.
Try the Google Talk client (Google Talk is Jabber/XMPP), I don't know if you can connect to non-google servers, but with federation you should be able to talk to people on other servers anyway.
Disclaimer: I don't actually have a BlackBerry, but I've heard the client is good.
I would assume that Google is paying a small price for every download. From the sound of things they might recover a small portion of their costs in ad revenue, but the real goal is to offer a compelling service to capture more of the massive Chinese advertising market.
Chinese Internet users now make up something like half of all internet users, and Google is currently losing to Baidu in that market. Thats a HUGE market to be losing in. So even if Google sees a net loss on offering music downloads, if they can become to Chinese internet users what they are to internet users in the rest of the world they just nearly doubled their ad viewers. Sure, an ad view in China is probably worth a little less, but with billions of viewers it hardly matters.
He doesn't mean people won't use computers in 5 years, he means that more likely than not students will compose and submit documents in a browser-based environment where it won't matter what operating system they run.
Of course with America's aging teachers worried about their retirement at the moment I'm not sure it will be quite that soon. I still have teachers who want me to print documents to hand in. In 2009. Really, its absurd, I haven't used a printer for anything besides school in probably 8 years.
Sure, if Shell were the only company in the world, they wouldn't have any incentive to invest in alternative energy. But if they don't, someone else will. So while a solar panel sold may be a lost oil sale, Shell would sure as hell rather be the ones profiting on the solar panel.
The problem here is that there is no profit in the alternative energy business, at least not on the scale Shell operates on. One day that will change, but there is still too much oil in the world for that to happen yet.
Another issue at play is the tragedy of the commons. The free market model relies on every transaction reflecting the true value of the good changing hands. Thats the idea behind a subsidy; one party is selling a good or service to another party, but the public as a whole also benefits from the service, so the public helps pay for it.
Thats also the idea behind the failed-as-implemented idea of carbon credits. When I buy a gallon of gasoline and burn it, I just paid a company to pump the oil out of the ground, refine it, ship it to me, etc. I even paid taxes for the roads I drive on. But I went and blew all those toxic fumes into the atmosphere, a public resource, without paying for that resource.
The only viable solution to this is to impose a tax on every gallon of gasoline equivalent to the cost of removing a gasoline-gallon's worth of exhaust from the atmosphere. By forcing consumers to pay the true cost of gasoline we will allow the free market system to eventually correct the situation and make renewable energy a viable business model that much sooner. Of course some subsidies won't hurt either, but you can't just subsidize "good" without penalizing "bad".
I know a guy who owns property in rural Alaska (a very swampy area), and in summer the mosquitos are terrible. He has been experimenting with the propane powered mosquito traps, and has found that he can't leave them out overnight. The problem? They catch so many mosquitos that the trap fills up and causes the whole thing to burn up.
His solution so far has been to run 3 of them at once for short periods of time during the day when he can periodically empty them.
I'm not sure how much propane they use, but he has also complained about that. Since he has to fly it all in, and propane bottles aren't the most efficient use of weight/space in a plane. I also wonder about the environmental effects of using those on a large scale. How much C02 do they actually produce?
I see a bigger issue here than the scam this particular group is running.
As I understand it, the stimulus bill allocates $17B to help hospitals across the country pay for medical record systems. Think about that number, $17 Billion.
There is absolutely no reason to distribute $17 Billion to a long list of organizations to individually license an EMRS. For far less than $17B the Federal government could buy any medical record system in the world to be deployed wherever and whenever they want at a fraction of the cost. Or, alternatively, for a lot less than $17B they could sponsor development of a standard, open source EMRS that could, again, be deployed by anyone who wants to at a fraction of what it would otherwise cost.
Obviously there are costs associated with deploying these systems, but the current "plan" amounts to a giveaway of $17B to Semens, GE and whatever other companies produce "certified" EMRS.
Did you read your own link? Every one of those results is about some product that hasn't been released yet. There are no mainstream ARM netbooks available today.
More important than Google's browser is their web services. Google wants to use new web technologies and wants faster javascript, IE has neither.
For example, "In order to make Google Maps work in IE, Google had to develop ExCanvasâ"a complex library that implements many of the Canvas element's features with VML, Microsoft's proprietary alternative to SVG."(Article)
In fact, most people seem to agree that Chrome is more intended to push adoption of newer technologies than as an actual end product.
I'm curious wtf he needs 3 laptops for, regardless of what they're registered for. I'm really trying and I can't fathom one possible use that a single person would have for three laptops at the same time.
The 1,000 year thing seems like the weak point of this theory. Sure, most communicating civilizations may not last more than 1k years (and this is an idea based entirely on observation of our own civilization). But as soon as you get interstellar travel, how likely is it that the species manage to die off entirely in a short span? Its easy enough to wipe out one planet, but what about the next? And every spacecraft that manages to escape?
Right now our civilization is like a closed source application running on a dev box off the network. If the hard drive dies, the code is toast. But as soon as you get that code in Git, its a whole lot harder to kill.
Yeah, but if you're 12 miles offshore you'll need to broadcast a pretty high power signal. And unless you are ferrying batteries out to your transmitter, that means buying a lot of gas. Which, if you haven't noticed, is expensive these days.
Slashdot Mirror
used primarily by adults
Really?
Sounds like fglrx destroyed your gentoo. I'm running the latest xf86-video-ati in portage on a RadeonHD 4850 with excellent results.
Look into Puppet or CFEngine (we use CFEngine but am considering switching to Puppet eventually). They're both extremely flexible management tools that will trivially handle package management, but you can use them to accomplish almost any management task you can imagine, with the ability to manage or edit any file you want, running shell scripts, etc.
The work flow goes something like this:
1. Identify packages that need update (have a cron job run on every box to email you packages that need updating, or just security updates, however you want to do it)
2. Update the desired versions in your local checkout of your cfengine/puppet files (the syntax isn't easily described here, but its very simple to learn).
3. Commit/push (note that this is the easy way to have multiple administrators) your changes. Optionally have a post commit hook to update a "master files" location, or just do the version control directly in that location.
4. Every box has an (hourly? Whatever you like) cron job to update against your master files location. At this time (with splay so you don't hammer your network) each cfengine/puppet client connects to the master server, updates any packages, configs, etc, runs any scripts you associated with those updates, then emails (or for extra credit build your own webapp) you the results.
You might be interested in the Touch Book from Always Innovating. At this point they're only taking pre-orders, but it definitely looks pretty neat. The keyboard is optional and detachable, so its not really "built in", but it gives you a good compromise between netbook and tablet, and its ARM based and cheap. I'm sure people will have Android going on it within days of release, as its basically a Beagle Board (which Android already runs on) with a touchscreen.
While I agree with you in principle, have you ever actually seen a penguin in nature?
if a student set up a service where they sold copies of their class work for... educators to buy copies to identify those students attempting to copy, then Turnitin would be directly infringing on their copyright.
I assume FredFredrickson meant that the index would be encrypted.
Both the original Rainbow Six games as well as Ghost Recon do exactly that. But they're both somewhat more realism/simulation-oriented than your average action shooter.
Try the Google Talk client (Google Talk is Jabber/XMPP), I don't know if you can connect to non-google servers, but with federation you should be able to talk to people on other servers anyway. Disclaimer: I don't actually have a BlackBerry, but I've heard the client is good.
Maybe it will work out better for you than it did for him.
The terms "reproduce," "reproduction," "derivative works," and "distribution" have the same meaning here as under U.S. copyright law.
I know I'm just a paranoid geek, but does that seem like a potential exploit? The license can be changed retroactively.
I would assume that Google is paying a small price for every download. From the sound of things they might recover a small portion of their costs in ad revenue, but the real goal is to offer a compelling service to capture more of the massive Chinese advertising market.
Chinese Internet users now make up something like half of all internet users, and Google is currently losing to Baidu in that market. Thats a HUGE market to be losing in. So even if Google sees a net loss on offering music downloads, if they can become to Chinese internet users what they are to internet users in the rest of the world they just nearly doubled their ad viewers. Sure, an ad view in China is probably worth a little less, but with billions of viewers it hardly matters.
Meant to mod that insightful, hit redundant by accident. Slashdot: please come up with a better way to undo moderation!
He doesn't mean people won't use computers in 5 years, he means that more likely than not students will compose and submit documents in a browser-based environment where it won't matter what operating system they run.
Of course with America's aging teachers worried about their retirement at the moment I'm not sure it will be quite that soon. I still have teachers who want me to print documents to hand in. In 2009. Really, its absurd, I haven't used a printer for anything besides school in probably 8 years.
Sure, if Shell were the only company in the world, they wouldn't have any incentive to invest in alternative energy. But if they don't, someone else will. So while a solar panel sold may be a lost oil sale, Shell would sure as hell rather be the ones profiting on the solar panel.
The problem here is that there is no profit in the alternative energy business, at least not on the scale Shell operates on. One day that will change, but there is still too much oil in the world for that to happen yet.
Another issue at play is the tragedy of the commons. The free market model relies on every transaction reflecting the true value of the good changing hands. Thats the idea behind a subsidy; one party is selling a good or service to another party, but the public as a whole also benefits from the service, so the public helps pay for it.
Thats also the idea behind the failed-as-implemented idea of carbon credits. When I buy a gallon of gasoline and burn it, I just paid a company to pump the oil out of the ground, refine it, ship it to me, etc. I even paid taxes for the roads I drive on. But I went and blew all those toxic fumes into the atmosphere, a public resource, without paying for that resource.
The only viable solution to this is to impose a tax on every gallon of gasoline equivalent to the cost of removing a gasoline-gallon's worth of exhaust from the atmosphere. By forcing consumers to pay the true cost of gasoline we will allow the free market system to eventually correct the situation and make renewable energy a viable business model that much sooner. Of course some subsidies won't hurt either, but you can't just subsidize "good" without penalizing "bad".
I know a guy who owns property in rural Alaska (a very swampy area), and in summer the mosquitos are terrible. He has been experimenting with the propane powered mosquito traps, and has found that he can't leave them out overnight. The problem? They catch so many mosquitos that the trap fills up and causes the whole thing to burn up.
His solution so far has been to run 3 of them at once for short periods of time during the day when he can periodically empty them.
I'm not sure how much propane they use, but he has also complained about that. Since he has to fly it all in, and propane bottles aren't the most efficient use of weight/space in a plane. I also wonder about the environmental effects of using those on a large scale. How much C02 do they actually produce?
I see a bigger issue here than the scam this particular group is running.
As I understand it, the stimulus bill allocates $17B to help hospitals across the country pay for medical record systems. Think about that number, $17 Billion.
There is absolutely no reason to distribute $17 Billion to a long list of organizations to individually license an EMRS. For far less than $17B the Federal government could buy any medical record system in the world to be deployed wherever and whenever they want at a fraction of the cost. Or, alternatively, for a lot less than $17B they could sponsor development of a standard, open source EMRS that could, again, be deployed by anyone who wants to at a fraction of what it would otherwise cost.
Obviously there are costs associated with deploying these systems, but the current "plan" amounts to a giveaway of $17B to Semens, GE and whatever other companies produce "certified" EMRS.
Did you read your own link? Every one of those results is about some product that hasn't been released yet. There are no mainstream ARM netbooks available today.
Am I the only one more interested in the ARM part than the screen part?
More important than Google's browser is their web services. Google wants to use new web technologies and wants faster javascript, IE has neither.
For example, "In order to make Google Maps work in IE, Google had to develop ExCanvasâ"a complex library that implements many of the Canvas element's features with VML, Microsoft's proprietary alternative to SVG."(Article)
In fact, most people seem to agree that Chrome is more intended to push adoption of newer technologies than as an actual end product.
I'm curious wtf he needs 3 laptops for, regardless of what they're registered for. I'm really trying and I can't fathom one possible use that a single person would have for three laptops at the same time.
Someone should tag this "clitmouse".
Just saying.
The 1,000 year thing seems like the weak point of this theory. Sure, most communicating civilizations may not last more than 1k years (and this is an idea based entirely on observation of our own civilization). But as soon as you get interstellar travel, how likely is it that the species manage to die off entirely in a short span? Its easy enough to wipe out one planet, but what about the next? And every spacecraft that manages to escape?
Right now our civilization is like a closed source application running on a dev box off the network. If the hard drive dies, the code is toast. But as soon as you get that code in Git, its a whole lot harder to kill.
Ok, so that was a terrible analogy.
Yeah, but if you're 12 miles offshore you'll need to broadcast a pretty high power signal. And unless you are ferrying batteries out to your transmitter, that means buying a lot of gas. Which, if you haven't noticed, is expensive these days.
1. In the US the spectrum is already sold
2. I highly doubt that we'll be seeing DRM on broadcast television any time soon.