Heh... I have a Quadra 650 with a rigged PC card from a Performa. I had to remove a riser card then modify the monitor passthrough cable to fit in the Quadra slot. It allowed me to boot Windows 95 and... umm, not a lot more. But it was cool to see though.
It seems that this is one of those cases where the crazy science fiction authors have pegged it.
On the one hand, there's this notion that crime will be a thing of the past because at any moment we can see where everyone is. Want to go hiking and then swimming and don't want to carry around a wallet? No problem since every store can immediately verify your ID and credit as you enter the building. Super conveniet. When you step in your car it will automatically adjust the seats, tune your 6 presets, adjust the volumes, load your phone number list into the car phone, queue your MP3s. Online shopping will be a breeze since your computer will have scanners to verify your ID point-to-point. Identity theft? No longer possible. And crime will be down. Want to figure out who graffitied a wall? Just check the perimeter logs and find the ID. Want to see who should/shouldn't be in a building? Check the entrance and hallway logs. After all, if you've got nothing to hide, why should you worry?
Then there's that other side... No implant? Then no credit for you. No purchases, no vending machines, no access to the school. Or maybe it will be an onerous process... Fill out a form, wait a day or two. In the clubs the twenty-somethings will politely turn away when you bring out *cash* to pay for a drink. What sort of freak pays with cash anymore?
But more than likely we'll accept the intrusions into our privacy because it'll be do damned convenient. We pay for our groceries and medications with credit cards, shop online for books (ohmygod!) with credit cards, attend subversive movies such as Jarhead or Fahrenheit 911 or Narnia and pay with credit cards, we book hotels, rent cars to travel to Omaha and Key West and pay with credit cards... RFID is just the next logical step.
All you people are so selfish. Imagine all those light-fearing grues throughout the world, their habitat already decimated by all this light polution, and you want to add more light. Sure, we've all heard tales of dumb adventurers who ran out of light and got eaten by a grue, but that's just because they'd encroached on the grue's habitat.
One thing that's really cool about Linux is that if you don't like one particular distribution, there are a dozen or so competing distributions that you can use instead. Now I personally like Fedora and RedHat. I've comfortable with the tools and quality of the distribution. Yet someone I know, who's a Linux guru, prefers Ubuntu. Another one prefers Gentoo. And there are arguments for Slack or SuSe, Mandriva, Debian, DSL, and what have you. If you don't like it, move on to another distribution. It's really that simple. If this business model doesn't work for Fedora/RedHat, then so be it.
And you know what? I'm really sick of people who don't contribute anything but hot air jawing on about how offended they are about this change. Whatever the distro, they are some damn fine programs available for Linux that don't cost a cent except for maybe a CD or some bandwidth charges. Having to purchase software for my small business only makes me appreciate the hard work of the community -- RedHat and Fedora included -- much more.
OK, I love books. I have old books and new books. Books with titles like, "Someday Sarah" and "The Autobiography of Chester Lantham". I love the smell of books, the feel of their pages. I love opening a book and finding a note someone left there in the 1940s. I've found currency in books, doodles, love notes, and what appears to be a rose petal. I love the feeling of peace when I sit in my library amongst my books; they're like shields against ignorance and apathy thundering down from all around. So it was with great sadness when I realized I would need to give away at least some of my books. They started to creep up to 3000 volumes. To put this in perspective, it's several walls worth. I had boxes in the garage and boxes in my office. The computer books weren't the problem. It was easy to part with "Introduction to OS/2" and "Working With CP/M". It was not so easy to say goodbye to a first edition, "Running Linux" or Locke's "Two Treatises of Government" But I realized that I no longer have the time or space to ever read them. And as much as I enjoy books, I hate it even more thinking that some beautiful words would end up being pulped when I depart for the great Library in the Sky. And not just beautiful words, but beautiful ideas, and beautiful ways to solve problems. Books aren't worth much hidden away in a private library. Their worth is entirely in the reading.
So unless you're planning to read all those books, have you considered giving them away or selling them on Ebay?
Okay, now consider the time it would talk to learn or create a database (not a big deal really). Then consider the time to enter the info for each book into it. Sure, the author and title, but what about subject? Ooooh, you're halfway through and realize you need to recategorize 200 books because you too specific or not specific enough. Do you want to include a summary? That will take forever. Maybe you need some speech-to-text software. Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8 is really cool. Spend a couple of hours getting it used to your speech pattern, and you're off and running. Of course you'll still have to check for errors.
Many current applications have the ability to query the Library of Congress database so all you'd need to input is the book number and author/title/subject/etc. can be imported. There's a Perl module already available that does this, as well as some examples in Python and C.
I dunno.. Drop by a Starbucks or a college campus and there are iPods aplenty. With the 18-25 yr old crowd it seems to be a hit. But that demographic is pretty fickle so who knows what will happen in 6 months or a year.
But Mac users do have that glazed over, SJRDF (*) blankness when it comes to talking about their OS. Reminds me of that Lovecraft story:
Presently the old man drew back his hood and pointed to the family resemblance in his face, but I only shuddered, because I was sure that the face was merely a devilish waxen mask. The flopping animals were now scratching restlessly at the lichens, and I saw that the old man was nearly as restless himself.
The new iMacs and MacBooks are pretty nice though. It's a perfect size for me, and is otherwise a decent laptop except for the single mouse button which makes it almost unusable with Linux. Hopefully they'll have a two or three button trackpad option.
1) Wired network in all rooms for video, backups, browsing. Wireless network for laptops.
2) Centralized data space (i.e., small data center) with good ventilation, external heat exhaust, good power. I'm not talking a separate room, but a designated area near the wiring closet instead of something rigged into the home-office closet.
3) Media server accessible from all video/audio devices. There must be options to have broadcasts to all devices so all rooms can have the same audio. Ideally, sensors in each room could track RFID devices to that music/video can (optionally) follow a person from room to room. You could also walk up to a terminal and have a central workspace automatically appear. I.e., work on a word processing document in the bedroom, walk to the office without saving, and have the identical workspace appear in the office.
4) Conference capability from every room.
5) The garage would automatically synchronize the car media with the house media.
6) Terminals would be available in all rooms, but are hidden from view when not in use.
7) The intrusion detection system would be accessible from selected terminals in the bedroom.
8) Integration with the environmental controls to allow the A/C and heat to be automatically adjusted via software and on a room to room basis. This is useful because my office is often several degrees warmer than the rest of the house.
9) Lighting presets for all rooms. I.e., be able to activate by voice/keyboard/remote control settings such as "movie theatre, bright, dungeons and dragons game in progress".
Drive-bys are a part of IT though.. One thing I've done when busy is to keep a visible list of items on my desk. When people walk by I put their request on the bottom of the list and tell them I'll get it to it in order it was received. Of course, some things have a higher priority than others, but it's up to you to decide this. It works really well when things get busy. If someone complains, it's a simple matter to have them explain the people above them why they take priority.
When everything works, they can open and print Johnny's files just fine, but what the heck are you supposed to do when the omgwtf32.dll pops up an error message when you try to open Johnny's picture?
I think you give that author way too much credit:D His article would hold a lot more water if I was the only user on my WindowsXP box. I'm not and share it with two other users. I certainly don't want them to trash my files as well as theirs when they click on some Spanky.mpg link.
RAM is not cheap for enterprise class hardware. You may be able to buy a gig or two of "high end" workstation memory for a $200-$500, but server RAM is 10 to 50 times more expensive. So it's ridiculous to assume that adding RAM will be cheaper than a cost/benefit analysis.
I've been in IT for close to twenty years in a couple small startups to some multi-nationals and in my own consulting business. One thing that lots of IT folks lose sight of is that IT is first a support organization within the larger organization. If the larger organization is sufficiently forward thinking, then they can (arrg, PHB-speak) *leverage* IT to be more competitive. But IT folks still have to make sure the website is up, the file server is accessible, users can login, etc., *before* you start thinking about the add-ons.
If the business doesn't want to spend money on the servers, then document what the consequences and benefits are for their decision. Don't just write that they'll have slower machines, but play Devil's Advocate and write up the business case for not adding memory.
Or, figure some way to optimize your resources so that less memory is required. This can be as simple as turning off services, or as complex as setting memory and processor caps within the virtual partition. And if you've tried all these and you're just short of memory, let them know.
In my consulting business my first goal is to keep my customers' infrastructure running. Next is to save them money versus some other consultant. Sometimes they need to spend money up front to save more down the road. Let them know if this is the case.
I wish people would understand the limits of what a computer can and cannot do. There's an impression that computers are very smart and should be able to detect all mistakes in the same way a person can. They can autocorrect a spelling error but fail when typing in a URL and many don't understand why it's pedantic in one context but not another. (Actually, URLs may soon have this behaviour too as search engines improve).
I like the moderation capability of Slashdot. It would be interesting if story submissions themselves could be moderated. I.e., just as I can browse comments at +4, I would also be able to browse stories.
Oh f*ck. I remember listening to U2 as a a kid in middle school. The "October" album was my first introduction to U2. That was twenty frickin years ago! Thank you for this glorious Christmas present. Now I feel like those doddering old folks who I used to denigrate because they listened to John Denver and the Carpenters...
I've got to say it: All Window Managers suck. GUIs suck in general. Not that I'm particularly fond of the arbitrary command switches, but at least it's easy to pull up a manpage or use a --help. IMHO, the problem with GUIs is they, by definition, impose a way of working on you. For example, if I want to view a list of files in a directory, GUIs fill the screen with lots of extra clutter. Finding the single file you want is sometimes painful. Even if you put the window in text mode, your options for manipulating a listing are limited. For example, on the shell you could do:
find . -name "*.log" -exec ls -l {} \; |sort -nk5
It may look imposing, but I can type that within a few seconds... or faster if I'm in vi mode or in the bash shell. Doing a similar thing in the GUI requires several more steps, if it can be done at all (you can't easily descend directories in most GUIs).
Of course, you need GUIs for other tasks. Try editing video without a GUI and you're in for a lot of pain. What's some good features:
1) Skill level based menus - One thing IMHO that's a good idea is having the "Advanced" menu option that unhides more esoteric commands. It's in some of the GUIs (Windows included) and is useful for me.
2) Icons that grow a la the MacOS GUI. For years I've had miniature icons on my taskbar. As my screen resolution got bigger, it seems the icons got tinier. I could use larger icons, but I hate wasting screen real-estate. By making the icons grow on demand is a useful feature.
3) Multiple desktops -- The GUI equivalent of "screen":D I wouldn't be able to work without them.
4) Transparency on hover - playing with some experimental WMs and found that the ability to quickly see what's in a window below without focusing or unshading is pretty useful in some working setups (editing web pages, graphics). It's annoying in others though..
Barcode technology is pretty cool and can be a great timesaver at the checkout because you can hire just about anyone to work checkout. Before you needed someone good with a keypad. You needed to know all sorts of items, etc.. With barcode the training costs for the employees go way down. United Parcel Service does a similar thing... Previously the people who loaded the trailers needed to know a range of zipcodes and routes. With a barcode on every package, a computer call tell them automatically where a package goes. Training costs and mistakes generally are improved.
With current store items the barcodes are often placed so that there's minimum human interaction. E.g., some boxes have the barcode on the bottom or otherwise away from the label. Plus lots of items are really similar.. Pick up some 1G SDRAM and compare it to 1 256M SDRAM. They look so alike that you cannot tell by looking at the item.
LDAP itself is not *just* for authentication, though that's one of its more popular uses. That's probably why there are not so many specific auth related tools. It's a similar thing with the more decoupled Linux LVM versus, for example, AIX's tightly integrated LVM. There are GUI tools such as JXplorer and lots of Java based apps that can add/modify entries. JXplorer, for example, can define template screens so that you can view only auth relevant parts of the schema.
The addition of a user is pretty simple... Just run ldapadd against an ldif file. To create the LDIF file is simple and you can do it with a perl script to specify username, userid and password. To create the password you can use crypt or md5. Something like:
my @validsalt = ('a'.. 'z', 'A'.. 'Z', 0.. 9, '.', '/');
my $salt = $validsalt[rand(64)] . $validsalt[rand(64)];
my $test = crypt($cleartext, $salt);
Of course, you'd also want to do some basic validation of the inputs. Then just wrap the user inputs in an LDIF template and run. It sounds a lot more difficult than it actually is.
The schema can actually validate that userid is unique, but you should check anyway and also validate the groups and gids.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I know why I stopped reading the paper and listening to the radio.
1) Internet -- news is a lot more timely and a lot better customized for me. I can customize my content so that topics which interest me are readily available on a single page. I don't have to wade through dozens of pages of advertisement and tear-stained human interest stories that are irrelevant to me.
2) Credibility -- My local newspaper (the Miami Herald) has often run glowing articles when some big company is in the area. E.g., when Microsoft visited some local schools, the Herald ran front page articles full of press releases from Microsoft, yet ignored stories about the issues they were having with schools and donated computers. Not to mention the tech reporter's parroting of Microsoft press releases.
3) Irrelevance -- the newspapers have added to so many special-interest sections that it's largely irrelevant to me, a typical geek who was once a multi-newspaper subscriber.
4) Bland -- They try to appeal to everyone and end up making themselves bland. In some cases it's because they write to a 5th grade level. In others, it's that they are so afraid of alienating a portion of their readership that they won't print anything edgy. I'm not saying that they should become a bigger "New Times" (an alternative area newspaper), but at least cover something else besides the same pseudo-controversial topics... There's an old adage that you're doing a bad job as a journalist if the readership on one side of an issue thinks you're biased. You're doing a great job if people on both sides think you're biased.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh... I have a Quadra 650 with a rigged PC card from a Performa. I had to remove a riser card then modify the monitor passthrough cable to fit in the Quadra slot. It allowed me to boot Windows 95 and... umm, not a lot more. But it was cool to see though.
It seems that this is one of those cases where the crazy science fiction authors have pegged it.
On the one hand, there's this notion that crime will be a thing of the past because at any moment we can see where everyone is. Want to go hiking and then swimming and don't want to carry around a wallet? No problem since every store can immediately verify your ID and credit as you enter the building. Super conveniet. When you step in your car it will automatically adjust the seats, tune your 6 presets, adjust the volumes, load your phone number list into the car phone, queue your MP3s. Online shopping will be a breeze since your computer will have scanners to verify your ID point-to-point. Identity theft? No longer possible. And crime will be down. Want to figure out who graffitied a wall? Just check the perimeter logs and find the ID. Want to see who should/shouldn't be in a building? Check the entrance and hallway logs. After all, if you've got nothing to hide, why should you worry?
Then there's that other side... No implant? Then no credit for you. No purchases, no vending machines, no access to the school. Or maybe it will be an onerous process... Fill out a form, wait a day or two. In the clubs the twenty-somethings will politely turn away when you bring out *cash* to pay for a drink. What sort of freak pays with cash anymore?
But more than likely we'll accept the intrusions into our privacy because it'll be do damned convenient. We pay for our groceries and medications with credit cards, shop online for books (ohmygod!) with credit cards, attend subversive movies such as Jarhead or Fahrenheit 911 or Narnia and pay with credit cards, we book hotels, rent cars to travel to Omaha and Key West and pay with credit cards... RFID is just the next logical step.
(I just saw Gattaca so I'm in that sort of mood)
I read those names and thought that these guys are some serious ST fans...
All you people are so selfish. Imagine all those light-fearing grues throughout the world, their habitat already decimated by all this light polution, and you want to add more light. Sure, we've all heard tales of dumb adventurers who ran out of light and got eaten by a grue, but that's just because they'd encroached on the grue's habitat.
In South Florida tomorrow (Thursday), a dorky looking guy will be presenting an introduction to Xen talk. Check http://www.flux.org/ for details.
One thing that's really cool about Linux is that if you don't like one particular distribution, there are a dozen or so competing distributions that you can use instead. Now I personally like Fedora and RedHat. I've comfortable with the tools and quality of the distribution. Yet someone I know, who's a Linux guru, prefers Ubuntu. Another one prefers Gentoo. And there are arguments for Slack or SuSe, Mandriva, Debian, DSL, and what have you. If you don't like it, move on to another distribution. It's really that simple. If this business model doesn't work for Fedora/RedHat, then so be it.
And you know what? I'm really sick of people who don't contribute anything but hot air jawing on about how offended they are about this change. Whatever the distro, they are some damn fine programs available for Linux that don't cost a cent except for maybe a CD or some bandwidth charges. Having to purchase software for my small business only makes me appreciate the hard work of the community -- RedHat and Fedora included -- much more.
OK, I love books. I have old books and new books. Books with titles like, "Someday Sarah" and "The Autobiography of Chester Lantham". I love the smell of books, the feel of their pages. I love opening a book and finding a note someone left there in the 1940s. I've found currency in books, doodles, love notes, and what appears to be a rose petal. I love the feeling of peace when I sit in my library amongst my books; they're like shields against ignorance and apathy thundering down from all around.
So it was with great sadness when I realized I would need to give away at least some of my books. They started to creep up to 3000 volumes. To put this in perspective, it's several walls worth. I had boxes in the garage and boxes in my office. The computer books weren't the problem. It was easy to part with "Introduction to OS/2" and "Working With CP/M". It was not so easy to say goodbye to a first edition, "Running Linux" or Locke's "Two Treatises of Government"
But I realized that I no longer have the time or space to ever read them. And as much as I enjoy books, I hate it even more thinking that some beautiful words would end up being pulped when I depart for the great Library in the Sky.
And not just beautiful words, but beautiful ideas, and beautiful ways to solve problems. Books aren't worth much hidden away in a private library. Their worth is entirely in the reading.
So unless you're planning to read all those books, have you considered giving them away or selling them on Ebay?
Okay, now consider the time it would talk to learn or create a database (not a big deal really). Then consider the time to enter the info for each book into it. Sure, the author and title, but what about subject? Ooooh, you're halfway through and realize you need to recategorize 200 books because you too specific or not specific enough. Do you want to include a summary? That will take forever. Maybe you need some speech-to-text software. Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8 is really cool. Spend a couple of hours getting it used to your speech pattern, and you're off and running. Of course you'll still have to check for errors.
Many current applications have the ability to query the Library of Congress database so all you'd need to input is the book number and author/title/subject/etc. can be imported. There's a Perl module already available that does this, as well as some examples in Python and C.
That's the funniest thing I've read in weeks.
I dunno.. Drop by a Starbucks or a college campus and there are iPods aplenty. With the 18-25 yr old crowd it seems to be a hit. But that demographic is pretty fickle so who knows what will happen in 6 months or a year.
But Mac users do have that glazed over, SJRDF (*) blankness when it comes to talking about their OS.
Reminds me of that Lovecraft story:
Presently the old man drew back his hood and pointed to the family resemblance in his face, but I only shuddered, because I was sure that the face was merely a devilish waxen mask. The flopping animals were now scratching restlessly at the lichens, and I saw that the old man was nearly as restless himself.
The new iMacs and MacBooks are pretty nice though. It's a perfect size for me, and is otherwise a decent laptop except for the single mouse button which makes it almost unusable with Linux. Hopefully they'll have a two or three button trackpad option.
* SJRDF - Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field
Things that I would like to see:
1) Wired network in all rooms for video, backups, browsing. Wireless network for laptops.
2) Centralized data space (i.e., small data center) with good ventilation, external heat exhaust, good power. I'm not talking a separate room, but a designated area near the wiring closet instead of something rigged into the home-office closet.
3) Media server accessible from all video/audio devices. There must be options to have broadcasts to all devices so all rooms can have the same audio. Ideally, sensors in each room could track RFID devices to that music/video can (optionally) follow a person from room to room. You could also walk up to a terminal and have a central workspace automatically appear. I.e., work on a word processing document in the bedroom, walk to the office without saving, and have the identical workspace appear in the office.
4) Conference capability from every room.
5) The garage would automatically synchronize the car media with the house media.
6) Terminals would be available in all rooms, but are hidden from view when not in use.
7) The intrusion detection system would be accessible from selected terminals in the bedroom.
8) Integration with the environmental controls to allow the A/C and heat to be automatically adjusted via software and on a room to room basis. This is useful because my office is often several degrees warmer than the rest of the house.
9) Lighting presets for all rooms. I.e., be able to activate by voice/keyboard/remote control settings such as "movie theatre, bright, dungeons and dragons game in progress".
Drive-bys are a part of IT though..
One thing I've done when busy is to keep a visible list of items on my desk. When people walk by I put their request on the bottom of the list and tell them I'll get it to it in order it was received. Of course, some things have a higher priority than others, but it's up to you to decide this. It works really well when things get busy. If someone complains, it's a simple matter to have them explain the people above them why they take priority.
When everything works, they can open and print Johnny's files just fine, but what the heck are you supposed to do when the omgwtf32.dll pops up an error message when you try to open Johnny's picture?
:D His article would hold a lot more water if I was the only user on my WindowsXP box. I'm not and share it with two other users. I certainly don't want them to trash my files as well as theirs when they click on some Spanky.mpg link.
I think you give that author way too much credit
RAM is not cheap for enterprise class hardware. You may be able to buy a gig or two of "high end" workstation memory for a $200-$500, but server RAM is 10 to 50 times more expensive. So it's ridiculous to assume that adding RAM will be cheaper than a cost/benefit analysis.
Interesting comments...
I've been in IT for close to twenty years in a couple small startups to some multi-nationals and in my own consulting business. One thing that lots of IT folks lose sight of is that IT is first a support organization within the larger organization. If the larger organization is sufficiently forward thinking, then they can (arrg, PHB-speak) *leverage* IT to be more competitive. But IT folks still have to make sure the website is up, the file server is accessible, users can login, etc., *before* you start thinking about the add-ons.
If the business doesn't want to spend money on the servers, then document what the consequences and benefits are for their decision. Don't just write that they'll have slower machines, but play Devil's Advocate and write up the business case for not adding memory.
Or, figure some way to optimize your resources so that less memory is required. This can be as simple as turning off services, or as complex as setting memory and processor caps within the virtual partition. And if you've tried all these and you're just short of memory, let them know.
In my consulting business my first goal is to keep my customers' infrastructure running. Next is to save them money versus some other consultant. Sometimes they need to spend money up front to save more down the road. Let them know if this is the case.
FYI - Mark Spencer will be talking at our local Linux group tomorrow. Check www.flux.org for details.
I wish people would understand the limits of what a computer can and cannot do. There's an impression that computers are very smart and should be able to detect all mistakes in the same way a person can. They can autocorrect a spelling error but fail when typing in a URL and many don't understand why it's pedantic in one context but not another. (Actually, URLs may soon have this behaviour too as search engines improve).
I like the moderation capability of Slashdot. It would be interesting if story submissions themselves could be moderated. I.e., just as I can browse comments at +4, I would also be able to browse stories.
Oh f*ck.
I remember listening to U2 as a a kid in middle school. The "October" album was my first introduction to U2. That was twenty frickin years ago! Thank you for this glorious Christmas present. Now I feel like those doddering old folks who I used to denigrate because they listened to John Denver and the Carpenters...
I've got to say it: All Window Managers suck. GUIs suck in general. Not that I'm particularly fond of the arbitrary command switches, but at least it's easy to pull up a manpage or use a --help. IMHO, the problem with GUIs is they, by definition, impose a way of working on you. For example, if I want to view a list of files in a directory, GUIs fill the screen with lots of extra clutter. Finding the single file you want is sometimes painful. Even if you put the window in text mode, your options for manipulating a listing are limited. For example, on the shell you could do:
:D I wouldn't be able to work without them.
find . -name "*.log" -exec ls -l {} \; |sort -nk5
It may look imposing, but I can type that within a few seconds... or faster if I'm in vi mode or in the bash shell. Doing a similar thing in the GUI requires several more steps, if it can be done at all (you can't easily descend directories in most GUIs).
Of course, you need GUIs for other tasks. Try editing video without a GUI and you're in for a lot of pain. What's some good features:
1) Skill level based menus - One thing IMHO that's a good idea is having the "Advanced" menu option that unhides more esoteric commands. It's in some of the GUIs (Windows included) and is useful for me.
2) Icons that grow a la the MacOS GUI. For years I've had miniature icons on my taskbar. As my screen resolution got bigger, it seems the icons got tinier. I could use larger icons, but I hate wasting screen real-estate. By making the icons grow on demand is a useful feature.
3) Multiple desktops -- The GUI equivalent of "screen"
4) Transparency on hover - playing with some experimental WMs and found that the ability to quickly see what's in a window below without focusing or unshading is pretty useful in some working setups (editing web pages, graphics). It's annoying in others though..
Barcode technology is pretty cool and can be a great timesaver at the checkout because you can hire just about anyone to work checkout. Before you needed someone good with a keypad. You needed to know all sorts of items, etc.. With barcode the training costs for the employees go way down. United Parcel Service does a similar thing... Previously the people who loaded the trailers needed to know a range of zipcodes and routes. With a barcode on every package, a computer call tell them automatically where a package goes. Training costs and mistakes generally are improved.
With current store items the barcodes are often placed so that there's minimum human interaction. E.g., some boxes have the barcode on the bottom or otherwise away from the label. Plus lots of items are really similar.. Pick up some 1G SDRAM and compare it to 1 256M SDRAM. They look so alike that you cannot tell by looking at the item.
LDAP itself is not *just* for authentication, though that's one of its more popular uses. That's probably why there are not so many specific auth related tools. It's a similar thing with the more decoupled Linux LVM versus, for example, AIX's tightly integrated LVM. There are GUI tools such as JXplorer and lots of Java based apps that can add/modify entries. JXplorer, for example, can define template screens so that you can view only auth relevant parts of the schema.
The addition of a user is pretty simple... Just run ldapadd against an ldif file. To create the LDIF file is simple and you can do it with a perl script to specify username, userid and password. To create the password you can use crypt or md5. Something like:
.. 'z', 'A' .. 'Z', 0 .. 9, '.', '/');
my @validsalt = ('a'
my $salt = $validsalt[rand(64)] . $validsalt[rand(64)];
my $test = crypt($cleartext, $salt);
Of course, you'd also want to do some basic validation of the inputs. Then just wrap the user inputs in an LDIF template and run. It sounds a lot more difficult than it actually is.
The schema can actually validate that userid is unique, but you should check anyway and also validate the groups and gids.
None of these are anywhere close to Roger Zelazny's Francis Sandow. He was rich enough to own planets.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I know why I stopped reading the paper and listening to the radio.
1) Internet -- news is a lot more timely and a lot better customized for me. I can customize my content so that topics which interest me are readily available on a single page. I don't have to wade through dozens of pages of advertisement and tear-stained human interest stories that are irrelevant to me.
2) Credibility -- My local newspaper (the Miami Herald) has often run glowing articles when some big company is in the area. E.g., when Microsoft visited some local schools, the Herald ran front page articles full of press releases from Microsoft, yet ignored stories about the issues they were having with schools and donated computers. Not to mention the tech reporter's parroting of Microsoft press releases.
3) Irrelevance -- the newspapers have added to so many special-interest sections that it's largely irrelevant to me, a typical geek who was once a multi-newspaper subscriber.
4) Bland -- They try to appeal to everyone and end up making themselves bland. In some cases it's because they write to a 5th grade level. In others, it's that they are so afraid of alienating a portion of their readership that they won't print anything edgy. I'm not saying that they should become a bigger "New Times" (an alternative area newspaper), but at least cover something else besides the same pseudo-controversial topics... There's an old adage that you're doing a bad job as a journalist if the readership on one side of an issue thinks you're biased. You're doing a great job if people on both sides think you're biased.