This may be a good idea, if it turns out to be secure. In the meantime, I'll keep my encrypted text file (via vi) on my main server, and when I need to log in somewhere that I don't remember the password, I'll ssh in, open it, and get it. Kind of a low-tech solution, but with cron jobs automatically downloading updates to other machines I have, I have encrypted backups of the file that stay in sync each day, so little risk of losing them, and only one master file to update.
Kind of trollish, but this is a legitimate question:
People who want all their content for free ignore the fact that it takes money to create content. How do you get around this basic issue?
I create content every week; I'm a musician, I write music for kids, and I perform it regularly. I record it, too, and I give it to people I know. I'll be recording an album soon, and since I want to go into a studio to have better production value, THAT will cost me money, and so I'll certainly be looking to recoup costs by selling the album. Hopefully I'll make a little extra, too.
But that part, the money part, isn't creating content -- it's creating content as a commodity item for sale, in an attempt to make a (teeny) profit. There's a big difference; I know people who have some of my songs on their iPods, and those recordings didn't cost me a dime, not even in labor, because I recorded them at home for my own personal enjoyment.
If the world is full of people creating music, and some do it for profit and some do it for love, what do you think will be left when the people doing it for profit leave the scene?
I'm not suggesting that would be a utopia, or even in the slightest bit desireable, of course. All I'm saying is this: content creation only costs money if you're trying to sell the content for a profit in today's market. Content creation on its own costs nothing but labor, and if it's a labor of love, you get emotionally paid.
I can tell you, with absolute certainly, whether your phone is transmitting or not. I can do it without breaking open any device, and without having to touch you or your phone. I can do it for $50, provided there's an AC power source nearby.
How? Two words: baby monitor.
Go pick up a Sony cordless rechargeable baby monitor. Plug in the transmitter, set the receiver to the same channel, and turn it on. Lots of electronic devices pick up interference, but the Sony baby monitor (and probably most others, but Sony is the kind I happen to have) makes noise when a nearby phone is transmitting, whether it's just checking in for your voicemail, telling the tower that it's ready to accept a call, or actually transmitting.
Different phones make different amounts of noise, and what they're doing matters; my Nokia 6101 needs to be within three feet, but my wife's Blackberry can make noise from five feet away. They both make the most noise if they're sending pictures, but they make noise if there's any transmitting activity whatsoever.
These are T-Mobile phones, so the carrier you use may produce different results, but this is a simple and valid way -- if you're in a meeting and are really paranoid -- to guarantee nobody's phone is transmitting. Make it a small room, randomly place multiple receivers around the room, etc. -- you only need one transmitter so that there's silence on the line, but you can use as many receivers as you need to cover the area, and the Sony comes in a convenient pack with two rechargeable receivers.
Do I do this? No, not a tinfoil type here. However, my wife and I have to go out of our way to keep our phones away from the monitor, however, because the noise is annoying -- so you shouldn't have any trouble making this work.
I have a minivan. I also have a small car. The minivan gets used when my wife and I, and our twins, and our twin stroller, and the huge bag of baby support stuff, get trundled off somewhere (it was also the smallest minivan available at the time that would fit all of those things and still have room for my mother-in-law.)
The small car gets used when I drive to work, and back (picking up the kids on the way, with the baby gear bag going on the front seat and the groceries in the trunk.)
Here's the irony: the smaller car is so old that it gets the same gas mileage as the minivan. Yikes.
I've been a recliner for as long as I can remember. Doesn't matter where or why I'm sitting; I always sit with a recline. Even on chairs with a fixed back, I slide my pelvis forward so that I can recline. I've tried to sit up straight, and I have great standing posture, but my body always works back to the recline.
I've been coding for almost a decade, and I'm the only person I know without back problems. I guess my body knows better than I do.
Okay, this is kind of a rant in reverse, but listen:
I run Debian stable on my server at home, and testing on my home and work computers. I can get my corporate email, open microsoft docs, do graphic prep work, and everything else I could do on my Windows box -- and run ssh-agent, authentication keys and a proxy so that I can do work things from home without delays, hiccups or nonsense. The only two things it's not good at out of the box -- Quicken and games -- are available if I feel like paying for the software to support it. I can do everything I need to do, and far more than I can with Windows (which is why I'm running it at work) -- and I can backup to an external drive with rsync. Oh, and I can use flash and watch AVI movies, and install the microsoft core fonts if I want.
There's just no reason to run microsoft machines any more, unless you're ignorant, or buy a system with no OS installed -- and even the debian installer is terrific these days.
Then again, I also found the weird tip on Nintendo's web site that you can speed up downloads by making sure your AP is on channel 1 or 11. I've heard complaints about how "fast" things were, so maybe that's it.
Out of the box, Linksys, DLink and other routers run on channel 6, and it's relatively unlikely that new owners will change it. As a result, you would expect to find areas with multiple wireless APs all running on 6, and causing interference (and slower speeds.) In my experience, this has been the case; both at my home (ranch in LA) and my mother-in-law's home (apartment on upper west side of NY) a scan picks up several APs on channel 6, and none on the other channels.
If you're in such a situation, switching from channel 6 to 1 or 11 will give you a speed and stability boost that's noticeable. Unless, of course, you're near someone who knows enough about wifi to be running on 1 or 11, in which case you'll jump to an intermediate one.
So Nintendo's suggestion isn't really about a shortcoming in the Wii, but about good wireless network management.
Eh. Talented people use tools available to them to develop a reputation and generate publicity. This type of thing predated blogs, and the web in fact.
No harm could ever come of this. There's no way that a security hole could possibly be found that exploits this somehow. There's no way that a user, confronted with router difficulties (from firewall misconfiguration or no IPv6 support) would decide "eh, I'll just run it without the router/firewall." There's no way that a person could, say, spoof another person's non-secure name, and get them sued by the RIAA or picked up on kiddy porn charges because lawyers and law enforcement don't understand technology.
Nope, nothing bad at all. Nosir.
In other news, Microsoft just landed a gig to run all the traffic lights in your town. Each traffic light will be connected to every other traffic light via a network, and will report its current ID and status (red, yellow, green) to the other lights. Via peer-to-peer technology, they'll regulate traffic on their own. What could go wrong?
There are multiple levels of "informed". Sure, you may not know everything about every candidate, but you can always skip votes for the races you know nothing about -- at the same time, you most likely know enough about big-ticket items (the war in Iraq, homeland security debacles, the handling of the situation in Louisiana, and so on) and recent scandals (various politicians who have done very racist, sketchy or illegal things) to at least be able to say "I don't know much about guy A, but I sure know a lot of negative/positive things about guy B, and that's at least a decent reason to vote against/for him.
Besides, if you're worried about "finding out" something you don't like about a candidate later on, yet you're uninformed now, why do you think you'll know more about him later than you do now? And if the issue isn't about something he did in the past, but instead something he does later, well, nobody knows he's going to do it, and no matter how well-informed you might get, nobody's going to be able to predict everything a candidate might do once elected.
Finally, if you subscribe to and trust a news outlet (be it blog, newspaper, or national media conglomerate), they often publish voting guides for folks like you. Of course, if you don't trust the news outlet, you might be played for a patsy, so be careful.
Bottom line: vote, even if you're only voting for the one thing you know about, or against the one person you don't believe deserves to be in office, et cetera. That doesn't mean (for instance) that you need to vote for the people being elected as state judges if you're completely ignorant of such things.
Just last night, I picked up three Airlink gigabit ethernet PCI cards, two for windows machines and one for a linux server. The box said it was OSx, Windows and Linux compatible, so I figured why not (plus they were $6.99 each.)
Installing them in the Windows boxes entailed installation of a driver, which windows went online and picked up automatically. I then had to disable the old built-in ethernet device, and do an ipconfig/renew (a reboot would have worked as well, I'm certain.)
Instalilng one in the Linux box (Debian Sarge) required no driver, but I had to view dmesg to see that is was being set up as eth2, modify/etc/network/interfaces to disable my old card and enable the new one, and reboot (/etc/init.d/networking restart didn't take care of my mail service, and didn't want to bother hunting it down.
So yeah, Linux was harder, but only slightly. Here's the problem, though; I knew to go look in dmesg, and what eth0/eth2 means, and how to edit/etc/network/interfaces. If I didn't, it would have been an all-night project looking up information online.
That right there is the part that makes this hard for non-Linux users to convert; it's the amount of research they have to do, and the lack of confidence they have to do it.
Re:Forget the environment then...
on
How Many Windows?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I did this; back in February, I attached a power meter (Kill-a-Watt) to my at-home server closet. One server, one router, one hub, and a laser printer used occasionally.
The end result? One month's usage, including occasional laser printer use, added up to less than a 100-watt light bulb left powered for 24/7. Is that insignificant? Depends -- certainly compared to my monthly DSL line cost, it is, and for my purposes the gain is worthwhile.
Having said that, if I could power it reliably with solar without breaking the bank, I would.
Right now, at this moment, having stumbled across this question...
On my Debian Sarge box running Gnome:
21 windows open on two virtual desktops (of 8 available); - 3 are firefox, one with 11 tabs, one with 3 tabs, one with 1 tab; - 11 are terminals, all but one ssh'd to one of two remote machines; - 2 are remote desktops, one VNC and one Remote Desktop; - 1 is a text editor, which itself has 5 tabs open. - 2 are spreadsheets, one with 3 tabs and one with 12 tabs.
100% memory in use, 53% in cache, haven't rebooted the machine in a month, no swap space in use. Every single window on the screen was launched today (started the day with a blank desktop on all 8 virtual desktops); every tab was opened manually (no auto-opening tabs.)
It is harder to use. I know, not once you've LEARNED it, but look: if I go into a store, buy a digital camera, and ship it to a person who has never used a computer before, they can read the installation instructions and get it working. You can't do the same with Linux, because the non-techie documentation level just isn't there. On Windows or Mac I can shove in a CD, it can automount, and install the software itself; Linux software generally does not do that.
Try to think of this as a good thing: you don't want a lot of non-techies using Linux, because compromises will be made to support that audience. At the same time, typing "apt-get install foo" is a heck of a lot easier than installing an RPM, and GUIs exist to make both processes easier for those who don't want to touch the command line -- is it so hard to conceive that it could be made even easier and more consistent?
Even a universal installer would help. Click an icon in the menu labelled "Install new software", and it says "Do you... ( ) have a.deb file? ( ) have an.rpm file? ( ) have a.tar.gz file? ( ) have an installation CD? ( ) want to download it from the internet?" Do that, and suddenly my wife can download a file (say a.deb) from a web site, run the installer, and get it going -- even if I've never told her what to do.
So yeah, Linux *is* harder to use, because it doesn't hold your hand.
What I want to know is: when are people going to start suing the makers of art supplies? I mean, I could go out right now -- RIGHT NOW -- get some cray-pas, and draw actual pictures of Jack Thompson. I could even sign his name, and give 'em out to friends!
Oh no! Big, powerful, important people have discovered that their personal, PRIVATE information is possibly being read by people less important than they! Which is terrible, just terrible, and it's a shame they can't do something about it, but technology is really really necessary, but also really really hard, and doing what it takes to have encrypted mail and whatnot is too much work.
Wouldn't it be great if those 5-10 admins could be fired? Maybe our trusty secretaries, who already handle most of our day-to-day grunt work, including the personal, PRIVATE stuff, could pick up the slack? I mean, there's no chance whatsoever that a secretary would use their access to that information to wreak havoc, or for personal gain; certainly, they wouldn't swap information about us with other secretaries, no sir.
I go to Wikipedia for specific information on a topic (as it's as reliable as any other page I might find on the web, generally) and google/yahoo if I need to find a specific site.
First: if your people in the field are running 1.2GHz laptops, and want to upgrade to 1.6GHz laptops, can you justify the cost? Probably not, because for most people using laptops, it's not the speed that matters (after a point); it's the portability. Yes, it sucks to be slower, but nobody ever gets a computer that's as fast as they want, and we used to run around with high-end laptops running 550mhz P3s. Your users won't care if they don't know.
Second: if the data is so important that losing access to it (due to a lost key or whatnot) is a big risk, then losing access to it due to physical damage, a bad drive, or theft is equally bad. The thing is, if you're not encrypting, then all of those cases (including theft) are a data LOSS issue; however, you're still open to data THEFT (as opposed to laptop theft.) Add encryption, and your data is safe when the laptop is stolen -- and is no worse off for data loss due to a forgotten key than it is for data loss due to other reasons.
In short: if the security of your data is important enough to justify the LOE involved with training for, implementation of and support of an encryption solution, DO IT, and ignore the speed/lost key issues as red herrings.
First: get a router for all the computers to pass through, with a web site whitelist (like the cheap and widely available DLink 808HV or 404HV); tell students that if they want to access a site that's blocked, they have to ask permission for it to be unblocked. Over time, useful sites will fill the whitelist.
Second: install VNC as a service on all the machines, with a good password, and configured to not allow keyboard/mouse control. Then switch all students to non-administrator access so they can't turn it off (stop the service) or uninstall it. Finally, announce to each and every class that you have the capability to watch any desktop at any time remotely, and will basically be scanning through every desktop in the room regularly and punishing everyone caught doing stuff they shouldn't. Then DO IT, until the message sinks in that you're serious.
Third: over time, do consider switching to a more secure OS, provided it can support what you're trying to accomplish in the lab.
So, the first time I ever logged into WoW, I ran around a lot, and tried to figure out what to do. After a while, I stumbled into various NPCs that gave me quests to fulfill, and in attempting to do so figured out how the weaponry and such worked.
Now, the first time I ever logged into Second Life, I ran around a lot, and tried to figure out what to do. After a while, I stumbled across various people (not NPCs) learning how to script, or testing something, or playing with things other people had scripted. This made me want to do the same thing.
The thing is, you'll like WoW and such if you are bored and need something to do; you'll like Second Life if you have something you want to do and need a virtual world in which to do it.
Unlike every other online service I'm aware of, Second Life exists only to...exist. The players determine what they do with it, and so without a built-in "purpose" per se, Second Life will live or die by things like Public Relations efforts.
I have to imagine that other online services must be a bit jealous, however; I mean, with WoW, you couldn't really make a press release out of activities in the game in the way you can with Second Life, because (using a recent example) companies aren't going to host a press conference in WoW. The fantasy aspects (and just plain game aspects) of WoW and others prevent it from being taken seriously as anything other than a game (and perhaps an economics experiment.)
So boo on the haters; let 'em talk about themselves all they want. Heh.
Well, I can think of a couple of good uses for this (and I'm not even being sarcastic):
1. When you're staffing call centers with people from a culture other than the one of those calling the call center, this can help them judge the emotions of the person they're talking to more effectively;
2. In various ways, this type of technology can help Autistic people figure out the emotions of the people they're dealing with, which is actually a very cool thing indeed.
I think this is awesome, because the only thing better than getting a badge for doing something is getting a badge for not doing something.
Here's hoping for an anti-axe-wielding badge, an anti-tripping-old-ladies badge, and perhaps an anti-cynicism badge -- oops, I guess I don't qualify for that last one.
Isn't this just that same old thing, where for each sporting event, you send a mailer to 50% of the people picking one team, and 50% picking the other, and whoever wins, that 50% of your original audience gets split between the two possible winners in the next mailing? Eventually you end up with a small audience, but they're CONVINCED you have a flawless sports betting "system" and pay you to learn it.
Here, by pretending you're figuring out who the "experts" are, you're not diluting your audience with each round of guessing; instead, you're diluting your potential pool of "experts" (or systems), and eventually everyone decides that person X is always right, when really odds were that at least one person in a large pool of guessers would guess right 100% of the time.
Past performance is no guarantee of future performance, people.
I love my Squeezebox. I have a box full of Logitech peripherals that I no longer use. I can only hope that they let the Slim Devices folks keep doing what they do best, but with the marketing muscle and distribution that Logitech can leverage (I hate seeing Roku players on the shelves at Fry's, but no Squeezeboxen.)
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This may be a good idea, if it turns out to be secure. In the meantime, I'll keep my encrypted text file (via vi) on my main server, and when I need to log in somewhere that I don't remember the password, I'll ssh in, open it, and get it. Kind of a low-tech solution, but with cron jobs automatically downloading updates to other machines I have, I have encrypted backups of the file that stay in sync each day, so little risk of losing them, and only one master file to update.
Kind of trollish, but this is a legitimate question:
People who want all their content for free ignore the fact that it takes money to create content. How do you get around this basic issue?
I create content every week; I'm a musician, I write music for kids, and I perform it regularly. I record it, too, and I give it to people I know. I'll be recording an album soon, and since I want to go into a studio to have better production value, THAT will cost me money, and so I'll certainly be looking to recoup costs by selling the album. Hopefully I'll make a little extra, too.
But that part, the money part, isn't creating content -- it's creating content as a commodity item for sale, in an attempt to make a (teeny) profit. There's a big difference; I know people who have some of my songs on their iPods, and those recordings didn't cost me a dime, not even in labor, because I recorded them at home for my own personal enjoyment.
If the world is full of people creating music, and some do it for profit and some do it for love, what do you think will be left when the people doing it for profit leave the scene?
I'm not suggesting that would be a utopia, or even in the slightest bit desireable, of course. All I'm saying is this: content creation only costs money if you're trying to sell the content for a profit in today's market. Content creation on its own costs nothing but labor, and if it's a labor of love, you get emotionally paid.
I can tell you, with absolute certainly, whether your phone is transmitting or not. I can do it without breaking open any device, and without having to touch you or your phone. I can do it for $50, provided there's an AC power source nearby.
How? Two words: baby monitor.
Go pick up a Sony cordless rechargeable baby monitor. Plug in the transmitter, set the receiver to the same channel, and turn it on. Lots of electronic devices pick up interference, but the Sony baby monitor (and probably most others, but Sony is the kind I happen to have) makes noise when a nearby phone is transmitting, whether it's just checking in for your voicemail, telling the tower that it's ready to accept a call, or actually transmitting.
Different phones make different amounts of noise, and what they're doing matters; my Nokia 6101 needs to be within three feet, but my wife's Blackberry can make noise from five feet away. They both make the most noise if they're sending pictures, but they make noise if there's any transmitting activity whatsoever.
These are T-Mobile phones, so the carrier you use may produce different results, but this is a simple and valid way -- if you're in a meeting and are really paranoid -- to guarantee nobody's phone is transmitting. Make it a small room, randomly place multiple receivers around the room, etc. -- you only need one transmitter so that there's silence on the line, but you can use as many receivers as you need to cover the area, and the Sony comes in a convenient pack with two rechargeable receivers.
Do I do this? No, not a tinfoil type here. However, my wife and I have to go out of our way to keep our phones away from the monitor, however, because the noise is annoying -- so you shouldn't have any trouble making this work.
I have a minivan. I also have a small car. The minivan gets used when my wife and I, and our twins, and our twin stroller, and the huge bag of baby support stuff, get trundled off somewhere (it was also the smallest minivan available at the time that would fit all of those things and still have room for my mother-in-law.)
The small car gets used when I drive to work, and back (picking up the kids on the way, with the baby gear bag going on the front seat and the groceries in the trunk.)
Here's the irony: the smaller car is so old that it gets the same gas mileage as the minivan. Yikes.
I've been a recliner for as long as I can remember. Doesn't matter where or why I'm sitting; I always sit with a recline. Even on chairs with a fixed back, I slide my pelvis forward so that I can recline. I've tried to sit up straight, and I have great standing posture, but my body always works back to the recline.
I've been coding for almost a decade, and I'm the only person I know without back problems. I guess my body knows better than I do.
Okay, this is kind of a rant in reverse, but listen:
I run Debian stable on my server at home, and testing on my home and work computers. I can get my corporate email, open microsoft docs, do graphic prep work, and everything else I could do on my Windows box -- and run ssh-agent, authentication keys and a proxy so that I can do work things from home without delays, hiccups or nonsense. The only two things it's not good at out of the box -- Quicken and games -- are available if I feel like paying for the software to support it. I can do everything I need to do, and far more than I can with Windows (which is why I'm running it at work) -- and I can backup to an external drive with rsync. Oh, and I can use flash and watch AVI movies, and install the microsoft core fonts if I want.
There's just no reason to run microsoft machines any more, unless you're ignorant, or buy a system with no OS installed -- and even the debian installer is terrific these days.
(okay, end reverse rant.)
Then again, I also found the weird tip on Nintendo's web site that you can speed up downloads by making sure your AP is on channel 1 or 11. I've heard complaints about how "fast" things were, so maybe that's it.
Out of the box, Linksys, DLink and other routers run on channel 6, and it's relatively unlikely that new owners will change it. As a result, you would expect to find areas with multiple wireless APs all running on 6, and causing interference (and slower speeds.) In my experience, this has been the case; both at my home (ranch in LA) and my mother-in-law's home (apartment on upper west side of NY) a scan picks up several APs on channel 6, and none on the other channels.
If you're in such a situation, switching from channel 6 to 1 or 11 will give you a speed and stability boost that's noticeable. Unless, of course, you're near someone who knows enough about wifi to be running on 1 or 11, in which case you'll jump to an intermediate one.
So Nintendo's suggestion isn't really about a shortcoming in the Wii, but about good wireless network management.
Eh. Talented people use tools available to them to develop a reputation and generate publicity. This type of thing predated blogs, and the web in fact.
No harm could ever come of this. There's no way that a security hole could possibly be found that exploits this somehow. There's no way that a user, confronted with router difficulties (from firewall misconfiguration or no IPv6 support) would decide "eh, I'll just run it without the router/firewall." There's no way that a person could, say, spoof another person's non-secure name, and get them sued by the RIAA or picked up on kiddy porn charges because lawyers and law enforcement don't understand technology.
Nope, nothing bad at all. Nosir.
In other news, Microsoft just landed a gig to run all the traffic lights in your town. Each traffic light will be connected to every other traffic light via a network, and will report its current ID and status (red, yellow, green) to the other lights. Via peer-to-peer technology, they'll regulate traffic on their own. What could go wrong?
There are multiple levels of "informed". Sure, you may not know everything about every candidate, but you can always skip votes for the races you know nothing about -- at the same time, you most likely know enough about big-ticket items (the war in Iraq, homeland security debacles, the handling of the situation in Louisiana, and so on) and recent scandals (various politicians who have done very racist, sketchy or illegal things) to at least be able to say "I don't know much about guy A, but I sure know a lot of negative/positive things about guy B, and that's at least a decent reason to vote against/for him.
Besides, if you're worried about "finding out" something you don't like about a candidate later on, yet you're uninformed now, why do you think you'll know more about him later than you do now? And if the issue isn't about something he did in the past, but instead something he does later, well, nobody knows he's going to do it, and no matter how well-informed you might get, nobody's going to be able to predict everything a candidate might do once elected.
Finally, if you subscribe to and trust a news outlet (be it blog, newspaper, or national media conglomerate), they often publish voting guides for folks like you. Of course, if you don't trust the news outlet, you might be played for a patsy, so be careful.
Bottom line: vote, even if you're only voting for the one thing you know about, or against the one person you don't believe deserves to be in office, et cetera. That doesn't mean (for instance) that you need to vote for the people being elected as state judges if you're completely ignorant of such things.
Just last night, I picked up three Airlink gigabit ethernet PCI cards, two for windows machines and one for a linux server. The box said it was OSx, Windows and Linux compatible, so I figured why not (plus they were $6.99 each.)
/renew (a reboot would have worked as well, I'm certain.)
/etc/network/interfaces to disable my old card and enable the new one, and reboot (/etc/init.d/networking restart didn't take care of my mail service, and didn't want to bother hunting it down.
/etc/network/interfaces. If I didn't, it would have been an all-night project looking up information online.
Installing them in the Windows boxes entailed installation of a driver, which windows went online and picked up automatically. I then had to disable the old built-in ethernet device, and do an ipconfig
Instalilng one in the Linux box (Debian Sarge) required no driver, but I had to view dmesg to see that is was being set up as eth2, modify
So yeah, Linux was harder, but only slightly. Here's the problem, though; I knew to go look in dmesg, and what eth0/eth2 means, and how to edit
That right there is the part that makes this hard for non-Linux users to convert; it's the amount of research they have to do, and the lack of confidence they have to do it.
I did this; back in February, I attached a power meter (Kill-a-Watt) to my at-home server closet. One server, one router, one hub, and a laser printer used occasionally.
The end result? One month's usage, including occasional laser printer use, added up to less than a 100-watt light bulb left powered for 24/7. Is that insignificant? Depends -- certainly compared to my monthly DSL line cost, it is, and for my purposes the gain is worthwhile.
Having said that, if I could power it reliably with solar without breaking the bank, I would.
Right now, at this moment, having stumbled across this question...
On my Debian Sarge box running Gnome:
21 windows open on two virtual desktops (of 8 available);
- 3 are firefox, one with 11 tabs, one with 3 tabs, one with 1 tab;
- 11 are terminals, all but one ssh'd to one of two remote machines;
- 2 are remote desktops, one VNC and one Remote Desktop;
- 1 is a text editor, which itself has 5 tabs open.
- 2 are spreadsheets, one with 3 tabs and one with 12 tabs.
100% memory in use, 53% in cache, haven't rebooted the machine in a month, no swap space in use. Every single window on the screen was launched today (started the day with a blank desktop on all 8 virtual desktops); every tab was opened manually (no auto-opening tabs.)
It is harder to use. I know, not once you've LEARNED it, but look: if I go into a store, buy a digital camera, and ship it to a person who has never used a computer before, they can read the installation instructions and get it working. You can't do the same with Linux, because the non-techie documentation level just isn't there. On Windows or Mac I can shove in a CD, it can automount, and install the software itself; Linux software generally does not do that.
.deb file? ( ) have an .rpm file? ( ) have a .tar.gz file? ( ) have an installation CD? ( ) want to download it from the internet?" Do that, and suddenly my wife can download a file (say a .deb) from a web site, run the installer, and get it going -- even if I've never told her what to do.
Try to think of this as a good thing: you don't want a lot of non-techies using Linux, because compromises will be made to support that audience. At the same time, typing "apt-get install foo" is a heck of a lot easier than installing an RPM, and GUIs exist to make both processes easier for those who don't want to touch the command line -- is it so hard to conceive that it could be made even easier and more consistent?
Even a universal installer would help. Click an icon in the menu labelled "Install new software", and it says "Do you... ( ) have a
So yeah, Linux *is* harder to use, because it doesn't hold your hand.
What I want to know is: when are people going to start suing the makers of art supplies? I mean, I could go out right now -- RIGHT NOW -- get some cray-pas, and draw actual pictures of Jack Thompson. I could even sign his name, and give 'em out to friends!
Oh no! Big, powerful, important people have discovered that their personal, PRIVATE information is possibly being read by people less important than they! Which is terrible, just terrible, and it's a shame they can't do something about it, but technology is really really necessary, but also really really hard, and doing what it takes to have encrypted mail and whatnot is too much work.
Wouldn't it be great if those 5-10 admins could be fired? Maybe our trusty secretaries, who already handle most of our day-to-day grunt work, including the personal, PRIVATE stuff, could pick up the slack? I mean, there's no chance whatsoever that a secretary would use their access to that information to wreak havoc, or for personal gain; certainly, they wouldn't swap information about us with other secretaries, no sir.
I go to Wikipedia for specific information on a topic (as it's as reliable as any other page I might find on the web, generally) and google/yahoo if I need to find a specific site.
First: if your people in the field are running 1.2GHz laptops, and want to upgrade to 1.6GHz laptops, can you justify the cost? Probably not, because for most people using laptops, it's not the speed that matters (after a point); it's the portability. Yes, it sucks to be slower, but nobody ever gets a computer that's as fast as they want, and we used to run around with high-end laptops running 550mhz P3s. Your users won't care if they don't know.
Second: if the data is so important that losing access to it (due to a lost key or whatnot) is a big risk, then losing access to it due to physical damage, a bad drive, or theft is equally bad. The thing is, if you're not encrypting, then all of those cases (including theft) are a data LOSS issue; however, you're still open to data THEFT (as opposed to laptop theft.) Add encryption, and your data is safe when the laptop is stolen -- and is no worse off for data loss due to a forgotten key than it is for data loss due to other reasons.
In short: if the security of your data is important enough to justify the LOE involved with training for, implementation of and support of an encryption solution, DO IT, and ignore the speed/lost key issues as red herrings.
First: get a router for all the computers to pass through, with a web site whitelist (like the cheap and widely available DLink 808HV or 404HV); tell students that if they want to access a site that's blocked, they have to ask permission for it to be unblocked. Over time, useful sites will fill the whitelist.
Second: install VNC as a service on all the machines, with a good password, and configured to not allow keyboard/mouse control. Then switch all students to non-administrator access so they can't turn it off (stop the service) or uninstall it. Finally, announce to each and every class that you have the capability to watch any desktop at any time remotely, and will basically be scanning through every desktop in the room regularly and punishing everyone caught doing stuff they shouldn't. Then DO IT, until the message sinks in that you're serious.
Third: over time, do consider switching to a more secure OS, provided it can support what you're trying to accomplish in the lab.
So, the first time I ever logged into WoW, I ran around a lot, and tried to figure out what to do. After a while, I stumbled into various NPCs that gave me quests to fulfill, and in attempting to do so figured out how the weaponry and such worked.
Now, the first time I ever logged into Second Life, I ran around a lot, and tried to figure out what to do. After a while, I stumbled across various people (not NPCs) learning how to script, or testing something, or playing with things other people had scripted. This made me want to do the same thing.
The thing is, you'll like WoW and such if you are bored and need something to do; you'll like Second Life if you have something you want to do and need a virtual world in which to do it.
Unlike every other online service I'm aware of, Second Life exists only to...exist. The players determine what they do with it, and so without a built-in "purpose" per se, Second Life will live or die by things like Public Relations efforts.
I have to imagine that other online services must be a bit jealous, however; I mean, with WoW, you couldn't really make a press release out of activities in the game in the way you can with Second Life, because (using a recent example) companies aren't going to host a press conference in WoW. The fantasy aspects (and just plain game aspects) of WoW and others prevent it from being taken seriously as anything other than a game (and perhaps an economics experiment.)
So boo on the haters; let 'em talk about themselves all they want. Heh.
Well, I can think of a couple of good uses for this (and I'm not even being sarcastic):
1. When you're staffing call centers with people from a culture other than the one of those calling the call center, this can help them judge the emotions of the person they're talking to more effectively;
2. In various ways, this type of technology can help Autistic people figure out the emotions of the people they're dealing with, which is actually a very cool thing indeed.
I think this is awesome, because the only thing better than getting a badge for doing something is getting a badge for not doing something.
Here's hoping for an anti-axe-wielding badge, an anti-tripping-old-ladies badge, and perhaps an anti-cynicism badge -- oops, I guess I don't qualify for that last one.
Isn't this just that same old thing, where for each sporting event, you send a mailer to 50% of the people picking one team, and 50% picking the other, and whoever wins, that 50% of your original audience gets split between the two possible winners in the next mailing? Eventually you end up with a small audience, but they're CONVINCED you have a flawless sports betting "system" and pay you to learn it.
Here, by pretending you're figuring out who the "experts" are, you're not diluting your audience with each round of guessing; instead, you're diluting your potential pool of "experts" (or systems), and eventually everyone decides that person X is always right, when really odds were that at least one person in a large pool of guessers would guess right 100% of the time.
Past performance is no guarantee of future performance, people.
I love my Squeezebox. I have a box full of Logitech peripherals that I no longer use. I can only hope that they let the Slim Devices folks keep doing what they do best, but with the marketing muscle and distribution that Logitech can leverage (I hate seeing Roku players on the shelves at Fry's, but no Squeezeboxen.)