Actually I believe there have been lots of similar events. A friend of mine is a member of some service organization and was on a club outing to nearby Canada by coach. On the border crossing back to America, they were stopped at the crossing when the border guards told the driver to shut the coach down and they boarded it. The club members were apprehensive as they had been replenishing the club alcohol stash and had a bit more than the legal duty free limits in the storage areas. The guards finally identified one older gentleman and questioned him, only to find out he had been a radiation trace injection four weeks previously. They were cleared and went on their way. If they have this equipment at all the major crossings and on the interstates, imagine the cost and the amount of money that has been spent on these type of projects.
>I dont know what you were doing wrong. No, neither do I. Many of my installations use software raid and work very well. For the design of this uber mediaserver, I choose a 3ware SATA interface in a supermicro server. I installed the OS on a single drive, initialized the 4x500GB drives, mounted them, and updated everything. Then I started copying over the movie content. I found the write times to be painfully slow. So much so that after trying everything I gave up and plugged the drives into the motherboard and used them seperately. I think that most of the posts forget that this is not critical data and that the system will continue to work if one drive dies, all that is lost is some of the selection and it can easily be replaced. This is not a solution for business data.
I did this a couple of times recently. I built a file server to supply ripped DVDs to three media centers in a house. I played around with RAID but got poor disk performance. Eventually I realized that the data is not vital information - the world won't end if you loose some movies and have to rip them again. I put four 500 GB drives in a Supermicro 8 bay server, with the OS on an internal drive. Each drive is mapped by each the UNC path, i.e., \\movieserver\movies1 so the media centers have four drives mapped on each one. If I lose a hard drive, oh well, some of the movies won't be available until they are re-ripped from the DVDs.
Had I used RAID5, I would have 1,500 GB and it would not have been easy to upgrade. I have ran out of room and I am adding a couple of 750 GB drives. If you use a linux server and LVM, losing one drives loses everything.
You are on the right track. The Call Detail Records (CDR) are comprehensive and there are packages to analyse them. I am also using a Call Accounting package that does costing by groups of extensions.
Call Monitoring, the recordsing of each call tot he ahrddrive is a native application and I am about to implement for a stock trading company I am working with. Asterisk is stable, powerful and free. If you are using IP phones and routing all calls through a VOIP provider, all you need is a linux server. I you need to connect to the PSTN lines, a 2 in 2 out card is only $500, and there are much larger interfaces for large scale analog phones and pstn lines. Contrary to opinion, learning to configure Asterisk is not hard, it just takes some time and a chance to experiment. I implemented it as our home office system first before offering it to clients. My family are fed up with the often broken system but you have to have that chance to play around if you are going to understand the dialplan options.
Send me an email if you need any help (masonc..at..masonc.. dot com)
I do these installations all the time. I use the Squeezebox from slimdevices for the client and their open source server software, which runs on linux, windows or Mac. The squeezebox is available as a wired or wireless box. However, you still need an amplifier and speakers, and they need wires, at least for power. There's no way around that.
Answer one of the spams that offers you somehting for free. I tried this as a test, I was offered 50 freed CDRs. I went to the site, filled in many pages of offers I didn't want, using a test address. I never got the end of the questions, it was, well, endless, but minutes afterwards I got tons of spams. After three days of crap I blocked the address.
The other think is to post to googlegroups with a real address, you will be inundated. Chris
In 2003 Ford motor company designed a line of radical new cars. In 2004 General Motors studied Ford's success and came out with a line of popular cars that also did very well. Ford, seeing GM's success, sued to prevent them from copying their ideas. Your honor, said learned counsel to the trial judge, anyone can see they copied our design. The steering wheel is on the same side. What more do you need? By the time the judge considerd all the similar design features, such as pedals, a stick, turn signals, he had to agree. From that time on, all GM cars had a steering stick, foot operated shift, brake levers, and the driver operated the vehicle in the prone position (Ford complained that sitting upright was copyrighted). Finally there was law and order in the land and creative design ideas were protected.
It's just a further sign that the fall of the Roman Empire is nigh. America is in decay, the lawyers run every thing, the legal system is setup to keep the lawyers working. Will you ever get sense, America?
Award costs against plaintiff of stupid law suits like they do in sensible countries, and it will all stop.
I provide support for my familyt and neighbour without too much hassle. The trick is that I put them all on the network, lock down the computers, use a smaba server with roaming profiles so they load all their settings from the server, and none of them have the ability to install anything or have local accounts on their computers. When another neighbour insisted on helping our networked neighbour to install program and was very upset he couldn't, and demanded the admin password, I offered to unlock the computer after I disconnected her from the network and shared internet feed. That was the end of that.
I don't do support for computers I can't lock down.
Responses to crime are always more complex when they are commited across borders, and there's no guarantees there will be a complete solution. However, consider the success of anti-piracy and anti-money-laundering regulations and initiatives. Also consider the following: Leaving out US/European spam, most spam tries to generate business for companies in US/European countries. If they were not, there's not many products you can sell from China etc. If the benefactor is in the US et al, the legal structure can go after the company.
If the Korean/Chinese/other country does nothing to assist with the problem, they can be blocked from the world's mail system and suffer economically. If the US State dept. ran a anti-spam list similar to the one they run for tourism, being on it would be very detrimental to commerce in that country - you can be assured they will move to prevent spam then.
All it will take is some effort to prevent spam on the part of the governments and spam will die down considerably. Couple that with spam filters and spam will be lowered to manageable proportions. Chris Mason
First, you're one of the brightest in the most vibeant business in the world. A good start! Second. bigger companies have debt, shareholders, marketing people, inventory..blah blah blah. You have no such encumbrances. Find an area of speciality and learn all there is about it. Show people how hiring you will save the vast sums or bring them great fortune... There's lots of opportunities for talented people with determination. In the mean time, keep your costs low and remember to be honest and fair with your clients, but, above all else, get paid.
Re:Be Careful - Don't try this at home
on
Do-it-yourself UPS
·
· Score: 1
As an electrician in a former life, and having a lot of experience with UPS's, unless you really know what you are doing, this is a project best left to the crazy guys. Large numbers of Lead Acid batteries are extremely dangerous, I have twelve heavy duty cells and I take extreme care around them. Also, this design provides no way to equalize the batteries, which will ensure they will die prematurely. UPS technology is very complex. I have a 10 year old 3.1 kVA Best UPS that has 90,000 hours on it. They are available second hand for pennies, much better idea than trying to build a half assed experiment.
I just spent a miserable twenty minutes on an international call with the stupidest sales person on the planet trying to renew a verisign domain because their website will no longer accept my credit card. Surprise, even the human automaton was unable to accept the card, and so they had to admit, verisign has managed to refine their system to the point where customers from smaller countries are no longer accepted. Our crime is that we don't have postal codes in Anguilla, and even though we have probably the world's only end to end wireless broadband network , we are too backward to be able to use our credit cards online. So now I have to call in favours to get my domains renewed, at least until I can move them to someone who does care about the customer and is willing to get paid for services rendered, even if it doesn't come with a postal code.
The answer is simple: Write a truthful recommendastion, and end it with a statement along these lines.. The opinions expressed are only opinions and should not be taken as a statement of fact, used as factual...I cannot be held liable... if you use these opinions you agree to indemnifiy me against any action....
with so many clauses that they will not actually use them at all because they would need the advice of counsel before they could even admit they read them.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I believe there have been lots of similar events. A friend of mine is a member of some service organization and was on a club outing to nearby Canada by coach. On the border crossing back to America, they were stopped at the crossing when the border guards told the driver to shut the coach down and they boarded it. The club members were apprehensive as they had been replenishing the club alcohol stash and had a bit more than the legal duty free limits in the storage areas.
The guards finally identified one older gentleman and questioned him, only to find out he had been a radiation trace injection four weeks previously. They were cleared and went on their way.
If they have this equipment at all the major crossings and on the interstates, imagine the cost and the amount of money that has been spent on these type of projects.
The PBS video clip is wild. $500 for a satellite.
Who knew there was only a few slots left in the Clark orbit?
>I dont know what you were doing wrong.
No, neither do I. Many of my installations use software raid and work very well. For the design of this uber mediaserver, I choose a 3ware SATA interface in a supermicro server. I installed the OS on a single drive, initialized the 4x500GB drives, mounted them, and updated everything. Then I started copying over the movie content. I found the write times to be painfully slow. So much so that after trying everything I gave up and plugged the drives into the motherboard and used them seperately.
I think that most of the posts forget that this is not critical data and that the system will continue to work if one drive dies, all that is lost is some of the selection and it can easily be replaced. This is not a solution for business data.
I did this a couple of times recently. I built a file server to supply ripped DVDs to three media centers in a house. I played around with RAID but got poor disk performance. Eventually I realized that the data is not vital information - the world won't end if you loose some movies and have to rip them again. I put four 500 GB drives in a Supermicro 8 bay server, with the OS on an internal drive.
Each drive is mapped by each the UNC path, i.e., \\movieserver\movies1 so the media centers have four drives mapped on each one.
If I lose a hard drive, oh well, some of the movies won't be available until they are re-ripped from the DVDs.
Had I used RAID5, I would have 1,500 GB and it would not have been easy to upgrade. I have ran out of room and I am adding a couple of 750 GB drives.
If you use a linux server and LVM, losing one drives loses everything.
You are on the right track. The Call Detail Records (CDR) are comprehensive and there are packages to analyse them. I am also using a Call Accounting package that does costing by groups of extensions.
..at..masonc .. dot com)
Call Monitoring, the recordsing of each call tot he ahrddrive is a native application and I am about to implement for a stock trading company I am working with.
Asterisk is stable, powerful and free. If you are using IP phones and routing all calls through a VOIP provider, all you need is a linux server. I you need to connect to the PSTN lines, a 2 in 2 out card is only $500, and there are much larger interfaces for large scale analog phones and pstn lines.
Contrary to opinion, learning to configure Asterisk is not hard, it just takes some time and a chance to experiment. I implemented it as our home office system first before offering it to clients. My family are fed up with the often broken system but you have to have that chance to play around if you are going to understand the dialplan options.
Send me an email if you need any help (masonc
I do these installations all the time. I use the Squeezebox from slimdevices for the client and their open source server software, which runs on linux, windows or Mac.
The squeezebox is available as a wired or wireless box. However, you still need an amplifier and speakers, and they need wires, at least for power. There's no way around that.
Answer one of the spams that offers you somehting for free. I tried this as a test, I was offered 50 freed CDRs. I went to the site, filled in many pages of offers I didn't want, using a test address.
I never got the end of the questions, it was, well, endless, but minutes afterwards I got tons of spams.
After three days of crap I blocked the address.
The other think is to post to googlegroups with a real address, you will be inundated.
Chris
In 2003 Ford motor company designed a line of radical new cars. In 2004 General Motors studied Ford's success and came out with a line of popular cars that also did very well.
Ford, seeing GM's success, sued to prevent them from copying their ideas. Your honor, said learned counsel to the trial judge, anyone can see they copied our design. The steering wheel is on the same side. What more do you need?
By the time the judge considerd all the similar design features, such as pedals, a stick, turn signals, he had to agree.
From that time on, all GM cars had a steering stick, foot operated shift, brake levers, and the driver operated the vehicle in the prone position (Ford complained that sitting upright was copyrighted).
Finally there was law and order in the land and creative design ideas were protected.
It's just a further sign that the fall of the Roman Empire is nigh. America is in decay, the lawyers run every thing, the legal system is setup to keep the lawyers working. Will you ever get sense, America?
Award costs against plaintiff of stupid law suits like they do in sensible countries, and it will all stop.
I found the email address for the lawyers and asked them if they would take the same amount as I was getting. Didn't get a reply.
I provide support for my familyt and neighbour without too much hassle. The trick is that I put them all on the network, lock down the computers, use a smaba server with roaming profiles so they load all their settings from the server, and none of them have the ability to install anything or have local accounts on their computers.
When another neighbour insisted on helping our networked neighbour to install program and was very upset he couldn't, and demanded the admin password, I offered to unlock the computer after I disconnected her from the network and shared internet feed. That was the end of that.
I don't do support for computers I can't lock down.
Responses to crime are always more complex when they are commited across borders, and there's no guarantees there will be a complete solution. However, consider the success of anti-piracy and anti-money-laundering regulations and initiatives.
Also consider the following:
Leaving out US/European spam, most spam tries to generate business for companies in US/European countries. If they were not, there's not many products you can sell from China etc.
If the benefactor is in the US et al, the legal structure can go after the company.
If the Korean/Chinese/other country does nothing to assist with the problem, they can be blocked from the world's mail system and suffer economically. If the US State dept. ran a anti-spam list similar to the one they run for tourism, being on it would be very detrimental to commerce in that country - you can be assured they will move to prevent spam then.
All it will take is some effort to prevent spam on the part of the governments and spam will die down considerably. Couple that with spam filters and spam will be lowered to manageable proportions.
Chris Mason
First, you're one of the brightest in the most vibeant business in the world. A good start!
Second. bigger companies have debt, shareholders, marketing people, inventory..blah blah blah. You have no such encumbrances.
Find an area of speciality and learn all there is about it. Show people how hiring you will save the vast sums or bring them great fortune...
There's lots of opportunities for talented people with determination. In the mean time, keep your costs low and remember to be honest and fair with your clients, but, above all else, get paid.
As an electrician in a former life, and having a lot of experience with UPS's, unless you really know what you are doing, this is a project best left to the crazy guys.
Large numbers of Lead Acid batteries are extremely dangerous, I have twelve heavy duty cells and I take extreme care around them.
Also, this design provides no way to equalize the batteries, which will ensure they will die prematurely. UPS technology is very complex.
I have a 10 year old 3.1 kVA Best UPS that has 90,000 hours on it. They are available second hand for pennies, much better idea than trying to build a half assed experiment.
I just spent a miserable twenty minutes on an international call with the stupidest sales person on the planet trying to renew a verisign domain because their website will no longer accept my credit card. Surprise, even the human automaton was unable to accept the card, and so they had to admit, verisign has managed to refine their system to the point where customers from smaller countries are no longer accepted.
Our crime is that we don't have postal codes in Anguilla, and even though we have probably the world's only end to end wireless broadband network , we are too backward to be able to use our credit cards online.
So now I have to call in favours to get my domains renewed, at least until I can move them to someone who does care about the customer and is willing to get paid for services rendered, even if it doesn't come with a postal code.
The answer is simple: Write a truthful recommendastion, and end it with a statement along these lines..
The opinions expressed are only opinions and should not be taken as a statement of fact, used as factual...I cannot be held liable... if you use these opinions you agree to indemnifiy me against any action....
with so many clauses that they will not actually use them at all because they would need the advice of counsel before they could even admit they read them.