Re:Fiber is still expensive
on
Wiring A New House?
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· Score: 2, Informative
"If you want super-fast communication between your computers in your house, and are willing to pay a hefty premium, them fiber it is."
Cat5E does gigabit. Current consumer hard drives can barely sustain flooding fast ethernet, let along gig. Fiber (and some will argue gig) to consumer and midrange machines are overkill and will remain so for some time.
However, Linksys has just released an 8 port gigabit switch for $189.
I'd be surprised if the Svideo or RCA cable can handle any decent level of quality on a long run. RJ6 (coax) would be a better choice there, it's easy to tap and can go long distances.
There is technology coming down the pike (some available today) that will allow digital video to run over Cat5E cable.
Fiber is highly unlikely to be necessary or desirable in the next 10 to 20 years in residential housing. Install Cat5E cable, it'll handle gigabit which should be fast enough for just about everything.
Instead of spending money on fiber, spend money to install conduit. Conduit conduit conduit! Conduit is nice since you can later on pull fiber or additional wires more easily.
Short answer, no. Linux systems have vulnerabilities as well. It is not some magical 100% secure OS. Likewise, Linux systems are designed for remote access capabilities. Compare to classic MacOS, where there was no remote shell capability built into the OS. This part is an arguable point.
Take a Windows system, and run Euroda instead of Outlook. That helps a lot.
And screw all the people who are using the systems or products in question.
I'm all for full disclosure, but blind siding is not ethical.
Re:Quick and Dirty Interrupt Handler
on
MS DOS: A Eulogy
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· Score: 1
/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app
Not too hidden. But Apple did a great job eliminating the need for the terminal in most instances (you'll need the terminal to start up named for example, which is included in the distribution but can't be accessed from the gui).
I find I use Terminal mostly to ssh, file management works well with the GUI.
Request for Proposal. You submit to a company a list of requirements and specifications. They in turn respond back telling you what they offer, sometimes how to implement, and a cost analysis. It's a way to make decisions as to which company in a grouping of them offer a solution to your problem. It's more than just going with 'what works for you', especially in complex environments, and includes looking at costs and infrastructure requirements. It's a decision making tool when you need to pick a vendor to purchase a solution from.
I've seen the DS1800 only briefly. I didn't know it could connect to ordinary avocent kvms. That's an excellent feature. Considering each unit's retail price is somewhere around $8000:)
No people, VNC is not a magical kvm that replaces the need for KVMs. Nor can it be used as one. It's more of a hack around using kvms, or for those who can't afford actual KVMs (which is not something to be sneered at - KVMs are really expensive).
1) If networking dies, VNC dies.
2) If something in the operating system goes really funky, you might not be able to VNC into it.
3) Additional system overhead.
4) If the system hard crashes, you can't see what the last error message says. Even linux and solaris boxes panic.
5) Saying that everything should be managed from a serial port is misguided. A GUI shouldn't be so dismissed, there are lots of WinNT servers out there with is mostly graphical driven, and there are X apps and the Netware console screen that you can't see through a serial port. Likewise, what about a whole bunch of workstations, probes, monitoring machines, and other commodity x86 hardware?
6) You can't see POST and OS loading messages with VNC.
VNC is okay if you don't have any cash, or perhaps in your house. It's not the greatest solution in the world, and can't replace the need for a KVM. I wouldn't advocate using it as a kvm in a machine room.
Well for general purpose operating systems like windows, linux, mac this isn't as great. In the current GUI model keyboard and mouse are superior. Perhaps if someone invents a voice controlled GUI (maybe with integrated touch screen or some sort) then you could, but the current GUIs aren't built for voice control.
There are other applications though. For example, a car radio. Why press the buttons to find radio stations if you could tell the car "tune 95.3". It has applications on a telephone menuing system.
But don't underestimate dictation software. There are lots of advantages of dictation. It lets you 'type' faster (assuming it's good software and you train it), and people who are disabled or have injury (broken wrist, carpal tunnel) really need it.
I've seen hacking contests before. They're really freaking lame. The results are not often announced, it just disappears. Or you get everyone doing a DoS thinking that is hacking.
"Bleasdale maintains it is impossible to infect a correctly configured Linux system with a virus, and conversely that it is impossible to make a system running Windows secure."
Okay this is quite clearly wrong. On many levels. Now it is possible that this guy set up a linux box with no services running at all. Fine. WindowsNT is equally secure with nothing running. But lets say a linux box has Apache, bind, or FTP on it. We've seen buffer overflows and other attacks on these software products. There is a delay from discovery to annoucement to fix available. To claim that a linux box is impossible to infect is just showing ignorance, unless of course it's running nothing at all.
Hmm. Let us see if we can brute force encryption by trying every possible key in the keyspace.
RC5 isn't that impressive from a technological standpoint. The time it'd take can be estimated on paper, with maximum and minimum times. Heck, the key could of been found during the first 3 minutes of the contest.
That's not just a Joe Sixpack thing. I don't want to do that either. I don't want to fight my machine, or learn lots of non-standard command line arguments.
Well I'd assume the gov and mil sites are registered only to official people (people or departments with government status or military personel).
A.kids would be registered to people who are normal citizens (of any country of course). So you'd have to make sure someone didn't register a.kids, put up a temporary site, and then take it down later and put up something not so kid friendly.
See if you have a TLD that's designed and promoted to be kid safe, then that TLD must be held accountable for the content inside it. This is because you're dealing with children here. I'll also for now ignore the debate over what is kid's safe and what isn't.
I do agree that a.kids would be a great thing and is a really damn good idea, but unfortunately wouldn't work out.
Nintendos, they used to be flat topped. Then people would put ham sandwitches and Pepsi on top of the device. This broke some of them when the soda spilled and bread crumbs got in the circuitry.
All Nintendos since then have been curveyed topped, so you couldn't do that.
Likewise, if you put a VCR on top of a DVD player, bad things will happen.
Some of us don't play games all the time, but only once and a while.
I don't like getting my ass kicked by young punks who play video games 10 hours a day, every day, and then being called {lame|loser|suck|asswipe} or what have you.
Sometimes I just like setting the difficultly level down as low as possible, and just kicking butt. Nothing more fun than stomping through a village in Warcraft destroying all buildings and peons in the way.
Slashdot Mirror
"If you want super-fast communication between your computers in your house, and are willing to pay a hefty premium, them fiber it is."
Cat5E does gigabit. Current consumer hard drives can barely sustain flooding fast ethernet, let along gig. Fiber (and some will argue gig) to consumer and midrange machines are overkill and will remain so for some time.
However, Linksys has just released an 8 port gigabit switch for $189.
I'd be surprised if the Svideo or RCA cable can handle any decent level of quality on a long run. RJ6 (coax) would be a better choice there, it's easy to tap and can go long distances.
There is technology coming down the pike (some available today) that will allow digital video to run over Cat5E cable.
Fiber is highly unlikely to be necessary or desirable in the next 10 to 20 years in residential housing. Install Cat5E cable, it'll handle gigabit which should be fast enough for just about everything.
Instead of spending money on fiber, spend money to install conduit. Conduit conduit conduit! Conduit is nice since you can later on pull fiber or additional wires more easily.
And yet, without ads, slashdot would not exist.
(including thinkgeek banners)
Administrators are busy people. Many IT departments are understaffed. Admins have better things to do than battle with the UI.
"So, would running Linux avoid this problem?"
Short answer, no. Linux systems have vulnerabilities as well. It is not some magical 100% secure OS. Likewise, Linux systems are designed for remote access capabilities. Compare to classic MacOS, where there was no remote shell capability built into the OS. This part is an arguable point.
Take a Windows system, and run Euroda instead of Outlook. That helps a lot.
And screw all the people who are using the systems or products in question.
I'm all for full disclosure, but blind siding is not ethical.
/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app
Not too hidden. But Apple did a great job eliminating the need for the terminal in most instances (you'll need the terminal to start up named for example, which is included in the distribution but can't be accessed from the gui).
I find I use Terminal mostly to ssh, file management works well with the GUI.
Request for Proposal. You submit to a company a list of requirements and specifications. They in turn respond back telling you what they offer, sometimes how to implement, and a cost analysis. It's a way to make decisions as to which company in a grouping of them offer a solution to your problem. It's more than just going with 'what works for you', especially in complex environments, and includes looking at costs and infrastructure requirements. It's a decision making tool when you need to pick a vendor to purchase a solution from.
I've seen the DS1800 only briefly. I didn't know it could connect to ordinary avocent kvms. That's an excellent feature. Considering each unit's retail price is somewhere around $8000 :)
Remote access and KVMs are different topics. Unless you get one of those KVM over IP devices, which cost....more.
No people, VNC is not a magical kvm that replaces the need for KVMs. Nor can it be used as one. It's more of a hack around using kvms, or for those who can't afford actual KVMs (which is not something to be sneered at - KVMs are really expensive).
1) If networking dies, VNC dies.
2) If something in the operating system goes really funky, you might not be able to VNC into it.
3) Additional system overhead.
4) If the system hard crashes, you can't see what the last error message says. Even linux and solaris boxes panic.
5) Saying that everything should be managed from a serial port is misguided. A GUI shouldn't be so dismissed, there are lots of WinNT servers out there with is mostly graphical driven, and there are X apps and the Netware console screen that you can't see through a serial port. Likewise, what about a whole bunch of workstations, probes, monitoring machines, and other commodity x86 hardware?
6) You can't see POST and OS loading messages with VNC.
VNC is okay if you don't have any cash, or perhaps in your house. It's not the greatest solution in the world, and can't replace the need for a KVM. I wouldn't advocate using it as a kvm in a machine room.
Well for general purpose operating systems like windows, linux, mac this isn't as great. In the current GUI model keyboard and mouse are superior. Perhaps if someone invents a voice controlled GUI (maybe with integrated touch screen or some sort) then you could, but the current GUIs aren't built for voice control.
There are other applications though. For example, a car radio. Why press the buttons to find radio stations if you could tell the car "tune 95.3". It has applications on a telephone menuing system.
But don't underestimate dictation software. There are lots of advantages of dictation. It lets you 'type' faster (assuming it's good software and you train it), and people who are disabled or have injury (broken wrist, carpal tunnel) really need it.
I've seen hacking contests before. They're really freaking lame. The results are not often announced, it just disappears. Or you get everyone doing a DoS thinking that is hacking.
"Bleasdale maintains it is impossible to infect a correctly configured Linux system with a virus, and conversely that it is impossible to make a system running Windows secure."
Okay this is quite clearly wrong. On many levels. Now it is possible that this guy set up a linux box with no services running at all. Fine. WindowsNT is equally secure with nothing running. But lets say a linux box has Apache, bind, or FTP on it. We've seen buffer overflows and other attacks on these software products. There is a delay from discovery to annoucement to fix available. To claim that a linux box is impossible to infect is just showing ignorance, unless of course it's running nothing at all.
Moore's Law has nothing to do with hertz!
It is about the number of transistors per integrated circuit.
Hmm. Let us see if we can brute force encryption by trying every possible key in the keyspace.
RC5 isn't that impressive from a technological standpoint. The time it'd take can be estimated on paper, with maximum and minimum times. Heck, the key could of been found during the first 3 minutes of the contest.
That's not just a Joe Sixpack thing. I don't want to do that either. I don't want to fight my machine, or learn lots of non-standard command line arguments.
Well I'd assume the gov and mil sites are registered only to official people (people or departments with government status or military personel).
.kids would be registered to people who are normal citizens (of any country of course). So you'd have to make sure someone didn't register a .kids, put up a temporary site, and then take it down later and put up something not so kid friendly.
.kids would be a great thing and is a really damn good idea, but unfortunately wouldn't work out.
A
See if you have a TLD that's designed and promoted to be kid safe, then that TLD must be held accountable for the content inside it. This is because you're dealing with children here. I'll also for now ignore the debate over what is kid's safe and what isn't.
I do agree that a
> ...text...
...text...
.com, .org, and .net top level domains have been administered and enforced so well so far, let's have more TLDs for them to enforce! :)
>.KIDS ( For kid safe sites only)
>
Yes, because the
Nintendos, they used to be flat topped. Then people would put ham sandwitches and Pepsi on top of the device. This broke some of them when the soda spilled and bread crumbs got in the circuitry.
All Nintendos since then have been curveyed topped, so you couldn't do that.
Likewise, if you put a VCR on top of a DVD player, bad things will happen.
Yep Verisign.
:-)
Because web certificate authentication is so wonderful as it is today.
Some of us don't play games all the time, but only once and a while.
I don't like getting my ass kicked by young punks who play video games 10 hours a day, every day, and then being called {lame|loser|suck|asswipe} or what have you.
Sometimes I just like setting the difficultly level down as low as possible, and just kicking butt. Nothing more fun than stomping through a village in Warcraft destroying all buildings and peons in the way.
Print it to postscript and then run the file through ps2pdf.
AOL also costs half as much. Some dialups are 1/4 the cost of broadband.
Nope man. Doesn't work. You forever get assigned to the realm of "the guy who can fix my computer".