Try running a Windows OS in VirtualBox sorta like a server, (in a closet, headless maybe,) along with the PlayOn software http://www.playon.tv/playon.
The idea is the Windows/PlayOn server can receive NetFlix fine, and stream to your UPnP Linux workstations. 'Theoretically', you could feed your MythTV this way with input from NetFlix-- I have never tried this.
Can anyone could suggest a nice UPnP client for Ubuntu? Does Totem do UPnP?
PlayOn costs $40, and maybe you've were given an XP license on some box you upgraded to Ubuntu? At any rate, this is competitive with the price of a Roku box, and if you run VM servers anyway, this reduces hardware, increases VPN options, etc.
I think its been maybe 10 years since I've actually gone to a movie... The whole idea of having to travel somewhere to get video content, well, that's been lame since...
People have 'dates' with others every now and then, and the cinema is a nice place to go during the process. In fact the cinema can turn dating from a potentially-stressful process into a more relaxed, passive and entertaining process. It can even provide something worth discussing afterwards.
During these 'dates' ambiance is a valuable quality, so perhaps dinner in a restaurant and a film at the cinema trumps what the basement-media-room affords. At least as an alternative for some folks.
That's a really, really old quote, bud. You better Google it to be certain, but just yesterday I heard that Lake Wobegone Software Publishing was under-water.
Try a different approach. Use full disk backups, especially on notebooks. Then dropbox works well, securely.
FWIW, Ubuntu Netbook Remix is awesome; I love it! Only problem is the easy installer doesn't support full disk encryption like the other Ubuntu installs do (just download/use the 'alternate install disk', which offers no 'live' test-drive options on the CD). To encrypt netbooks, here's an easy way: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=7489558&postcount=13
Also, if you support an office, why not have folks (transparently) proxy the office dd-wrt router via ssh, from the unsecure coffee-shop 'free' wifi they like so much? So they use only truly trusted networks?
I agree with all you've written above. I'd also like to add something of an explanation for why things are the way they are. Sort of.
Drupal 'evolved' to be the way it is now. And during each iteration, the core-developers shed whatever old for the new. There has always been a documented upgrade path for sites, but yeah, you had to follow the directions. And Drupal full-version upgrades are not anything like a double-click affair.
So really, Drupal's success has been along Darwinian models. Like linux too. Old modules became unused in favor of whatever works better. if you make sites for a living, there's a process for managing sites, that is well written in BOOKS that are SOLD, or just peruse the user-docs from drupal.org.
But along those darwinian models... take the module upgrade status report page for example. Where did that come from(?), and you'd be amazed at where that community organization and project management is going! Not unlike Linux, but for online publishing using (mostly) LAMP, on widely available hosting packages.
Folks, have you heard of Deanspace? As in Howard Dean's web-enabled CRM that was widely reported as a successful fund-raising tool, that propelled Dean ahead toward's a democratic presidential victory, until John Kerry pulled ahead?
The folks that came together and collaborated on Deanspace open-sourced it. It was based on Drupal, and their powerful CRM back-end was spun-off and is now a very successful project called www.civicrm.org. These days, it makes sense to integrate both with transparently, which is well-documented. This is one single nice recipe, for example.
Think of it like Drupal as a client-facing front-end. Clients (the public?) can register with the site, lose their password and reset it, change newsletter subscriptions, that sort of thing. CiviCRM is the all-knowing powerful back-end. AFAIK CiviCRM is _well_ financed by political parties of all sorts, and they do a great job, I think. You can add Ubercart as an e-commerce transaction engine as well, which ties in nicely with your CRM engine.
Imagine folks, you COULD make your own facebook or myspace or youtube or flickr easily using Drupal, and even manage transactions. There's nothing stopping you, as a professional, if this is what you want to do. Drupal has a huge and enthusiastic community of developers. Drupal sites can easily become the 'front-end' developers use to create facebook applications.
It is worth checking out the live demo on their site, if for no other reason than to see exactly what it is capable of, and what political parties want to keep track of, (stock out of the box). Like: who is related to who. And, 'what is this person's most important issue?' with choices like gun rights, pro-life/choice, etc.
The only problem I have with Clipperz, is that it doesn't automatically log me off their site after say, 5-10 minutes or so. So I switched to www.passpack.com.
The idea of logging into passpack Clipperz (or whatever web-service), having all my accounts and passwords unlocked, while I was at work in the office, where my colleagues might access my workstation when I got up to take a leak... That's the stuff of nightmares I'm trying to avoid for sure. So I use passpack instead.
When I am at home, I can stay logged in longer, it is my choice.
Other features I like are 'sharing' passwords with other passpack account holders, and the secure email of passwords (via web-service links).
What else can I say? Use a LAMP server? Debian, or Ubuntu, or CentOS is popular in this space. In fact you really don't need to operate your own server even. There's nothing magic about your spec., and people host stuff with waaaay more than 20 terminals' in mind. Plus Drupal gives you a decent content creation/editing workflow.
Also you might find its multilingual capabilities, both for the staff as well as the visitors, to be very good.
Can I contact you for this development gig? Using Drupal on LAMP, your budget will go far. Even common things like statistics modules will demonstrate to stakeholders whether it's working or not, what is popular. etc.
You can multi-boot or virtualize Linux, Windows or any other O/S you care for.
Umm, but I can't virtualize OSX. That right there is a deal-breaker for me. Has been for the longest time. Ubuntu is a great workstation OS for me, as a web developer
Hmm, I was thinking those words were gonna be: selective breeding.
Until that works out, I suggest we focus on telescopes and probes, rovers, and those things that float in seas of frozen methane. Also as a way to reduce our carbon emissions by using lower weight vehicles.
No he didn't. In fact, Apple misappropriated his image when they ran the 'Think Different'" Campaign. You know the one, where they had a chorus of people show how they all 'think different' by using Apple PCs?
Albert Einstein would have said it is much better to think differently.
Some notes on Linksys, having been a dd-wrt advocate for years. Recently there's your Linksys 610N, and your 160N. Still not clear enough? As some posted prior, carefully read the supported hardware list prior to purchase, also paying careful attention to the hardware version number! On both the 610N and 160N, only version 1 is supported by dd-wrt as I recall. Version 2 hardware is considered to be a long-running Work In-Progress (i.e. no deadline, so shut up about that), and version 3 hardware is a clear No, don't buy it, it is unsupported and probably won't work at all.)
In all my years, I only bricked one, Asus 500 Premium, which can be tricky to initially flash. I currently run Buffalo, older Linksys, and my current favorite, just recently made Hard-To-get in the shops, a 50 euro Netgear WNR834B. Take it home, and use the Netgear stock web interface to flash upgrade to DD-wrt and life is good ever since. A dd-wrt trivial pursuit price (so I bought another, and am glad i did).
I particularly enjoy swapping hardware config profiles between what has in-effect become generic, stable, cheap, dare i say commodity, Linux hardware. It is a great networking platform to standardize on, I think.
One more note, this past weekend, I chained 2 dd-wrts together, to form subnets between home/offices in a co-op building unit. An asterisk server sits behind the 2nd dd-wrt firewall, and seemingly I had nightmare NAT traversal issues for the SIP telephones. Nope, I used the VOIP Milkfish version of dd-wrt on both routers, and configured the asterisk box www.12voip.com trunk with:
outboundproxy=EXTERNALIPADDRESS
No need to open ports on such a fine Milkfish SIP proxy, even subnetted as such, just do as I did. For low-energy-linux prices & stability.
My folks' Asus dd-wrt router gets something like 1 years uptime. They reboot whenever they lose electricity to the house. And they have some kind of line-of-sight wireless internet via www.commspeed.net
My setup is a little different then what the OP is looking for, but it works well for me, in case anyone else is interested.
For 300 euros, I bought an Asus Eee 1000HE several months ago. The honest 6+ hrs battery life plus its weight makes it truly ultraportable, since I don't need to carry any cord or brick in my backpack. The Ubuntu Netbook interface works well on the small screen, and the CPU is efficient running Linux, & Firefox, etc. Skype audio/video doesn't work well I find (the Ubuntu Skype version is old), but Ekiga SIP does. In reality, the hours in-use is greater than just 6, because inevitably I'll get distracted, eat lunch, etc., so the sleep mode kicks in. I relax knowing the little thing has a fully encrypted hard disk, from these instructions:
I cannot imagine running the XP OS (tax) that came with the unit, XP the interface seems like it would be too clumsy on the small screen, and with anti-virus etc. would slow things too much.
I have another 300 euro Compaq 15" notebook with a similarly installed Ubuntu OS so for me, the question when I leave the door for the day is: Do I need the larger screen, or true portability? If I'm just reading docs at the cafe, I love the Asus Eee PC. Each has a Logitech wireless mouse VX450 and a tiny USB nub that remains in-place 24/7. Its critical, (the batteries seem to last 1 year)
One key to everything working out so well, is my Dropbox acct which auto syncs files across home folders. In this way, I use the best suited of my two portable PCs for the day (big screen + brick, or more portable.) (Spider-oak has a better privacy policy than Dropbox though, and I'm meaning to switch). I figure both my Asus and Compaq cost less than half the price of Apple's cheapest notebook. But then in my work, I am happy using Gnome & firefox, etc.
For managing the Win 98 of the OP, I agree Virtual Box is quite capable, free, and runs well on Ubuntu. But not really on the cheap notebooks I described.
This is a problem I have understood for quite some time. The 'management' wants dark age technology, and will resist change; this is clear.
What I do not understand, is where are the lobbyists for the larger document management companies, (Documentum, Hummingbird, Filenet, or any others, and no I'm not endorsing here). Why is this space so quiet from those seemingly interested in Profit$?
The only explanation I can think of, well, assumption actually, is the congress doesn't want to pick say IBM (for example) to manage The Bills while having to say No to all others. I can imagine the competitive bid process for That Contract.
A few years ago, there was a bill that got passed late at night, at the very end of a session of congress. Some joker stuck in some weird provision that everyone objected to, and it got written into law because no one had time to 'look'. Version control would have clearly highlighted such a sneaky move, in time. In fact the first order of business of the new congress was to change that particular aspect of that law. Kudos to whoever can provide more precise details than me.
What is the net effect? Can these data be compared to model predictions?
Let's start by an extremely rapid decline in habitat for a great many and varied species, that we cannot possibly begin to fully appreciate scientifically, let alone model with any accuracy.
Slashdot Mirror
Try running a Windows OS in VirtualBox sorta like a server, (in a closet, headless maybe,) along with the PlayOn software http://www.playon.tv/playon.
The idea is the Windows/PlayOn server can receive NetFlix fine, and stream to your UPnP Linux workstations. 'Theoretically', you could feed your MythTV this way with input from NetFlix-- I have never tried this.
Can anyone could suggest a nice UPnP client for Ubuntu? Does Totem do UPnP?
PlayOn costs $40, and maybe you've were given an XP license on some box you upgraded to Ubuntu? At any rate, this is competitive with the price of a Roku box, and if you run VM servers anyway, this reduces hardware, increases VPN options, etc.
mod +1 Instigation
I think its been maybe 10 years since I've actually gone to a movie ... The whole idea of having to travel somewhere to get video content, well, that's been lame since...
People have 'dates' with others every now and then, and the cinema is a nice place to go during the process. In fact the cinema can turn dating from a potentially-stressful process into a more relaxed, passive and entertaining process. It can even provide something worth discussing afterwards.
During these 'dates' ambiance is a valuable quality, so perhaps dinner in a restaurant and a film at the cinema trumps what the basement-media-room affords. At least as an alternative for some folks.
That's a really, really old quote, bud. You better Google it to be certain, but just yesterday I heard that Lake Wobegone Software Publishing was under-water.
Bracknell is nice. There is a pub there also, and it is relatively sunny in contrast to London.
Point taken. I say let's vote up RMS & Linus as winners to share the prize.
Try a different approach. Use full disk backups, especially on notebooks. Then dropbox works well, securely.
FWIW, Ubuntu Netbook Remix is awesome; I love it! Only problem is the easy installer doesn't support full disk encryption like the other Ubuntu installs do (just download/use the 'alternate install disk', which offers no 'live' test-drive options on the CD). To encrypt netbooks, here's an easy way: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=7489558&postcount=13
Also, if you support an office, why not have folks (transparently) proxy the office dd-wrt router via ssh, from the unsecure coffee-shop 'free' wifi they like so much? So they use only truly trusted networks?
I agree with all you've written above. I'd also like to add something of an explanation for why things are the way they are. Sort of.
Drupal 'evolved' to be the way it is now. And during each iteration, the core-developers shed whatever old for the new. There has always been a documented upgrade path for sites, but yeah, you had to follow the directions. And Drupal full-version upgrades are not anything like a double-click affair.
So really, Drupal's success has been along Darwinian models. Like linux too. Old modules became unused in favor of whatever works better. if you make sites for a living, there's a process for managing sites, that is well written in BOOKS that are SOLD, or just peruse the user-docs from drupal.org.
But along those darwinian models... take the module upgrade status report page for example. Where did that come from(?), and you'd be amazed at where that community organization and project management is going! Not unlike Linux, but for online publishing using (mostly) LAMP, on widely available hosting packages.
Folks, have you heard of Deanspace? As in Howard Dean's web-enabled CRM that was widely reported as a successful fund-raising tool, that propelled Dean ahead toward's a democratic presidential victory, until John Kerry pulled ahead?
The folks that came together and collaborated on Deanspace open-sourced it. It was based on Drupal, and their powerful CRM back-end was spun-off and is now a very successful project called www.civicrm.org. These days, it makes sense to integrate both with transparently, which is well-documented. This is one single nice recipe, for example.
Think of it like Drupal as a client-facing front-end. Clients (the public?) can register with the site, lose their password and reset it, change newsletter subscriptions, that sort of thing. CiviCRM is the all-knowing powerful back-end. AFAIK CiviCRM is _well_ financed by political parties of all sorts, and they do a great job, I think. You can add Ubercart as an e-commerce transaction engine as well, which ties in nicely with your CRM engine.
Imagine folks, you COULD make your own facebook or myspace or youtube or flickr easily using Drupal, and even manage transactions. There's nothing stopping you, as a professional, if this is what you want to do. Drupal has a huge and enthusiastic community of developers. Drupal sites can easily become the 'front-end' developers use to create facebook applications.
It is worth checking out the live demo on their site, if for no other reason than to see exactly what it is capable of, and what political parties want to keep track of, (stock out of the box). Like: who is related to who. And, 'what is this person's most important issue?' with choices like gun rights, pro-life/choice, etc.
Well yeah, sure. You'll be fine, but what about your descendants? Oh wait... BESIDES, this being slashdot and all.
The only problem I have with Clipperz, is that it doesn't automatically log me off their site after say, 5-10 minutes or so. So I switched to www.passpack.com.
The idea of logging into passpack Clipperz (or whatever web-service), having all my accounts and passwords unlocked, while I was at work in the office, where my colleagues might access my workstation when I got up to take a leak... That's the stuff of nightmares I'm trying to avoid for sure. So I use passpack instead.
When I am at home, I can stay logged in longer, it is my choice.
Other features I like are 'sharing' passwords with other passpack account holders, and the secure email of passwords (via web-service links).
What else can I say? Use a LAMP server? Debian, or Ubuntu, or CentOS is popular in this space. In fact you really don't need to operate your own server even. There's nothing magic about your spec., and people host stuff with waaaay more than 20 terminals' in mind. Plus Drupal gives you a decent content creation/editing workflow.
Also you might find its multilingual capabilities, both for the staff as well as the visitors, to be very good.
Can I contact you for this development gig? Using Drupal on LAMP, your budget will go far. Even common things like statistics modules will demonstrate to stakeholders whether it's working or not, what is popular. etc.
Umm, but I can't virtualize OSX. That right there is a deal-breaker for me. Has been for the longest time. Ubuntu is a great workstation OS for me, as a web developer
Hmm, I was thinking those words were gonna be: selective breeding.
Until that works out, I suggest we focus on telescopes and probes, rovers, and those things that float in seas of frozen methane. Also as a way to reduce our carbon emissions by using lower weight vehicles.
http://nationalzoo.si.edu/Animals/SmallMammals/default.cfm?cam=NMR
Oh wait, that's me. Fsck.
Try moving your finger lower and a little bit to the left, and maybe somewhat faster? Oh wait, you said narcissistic. Oops, my bad; nevermind.
No he didn't. In fact, Apple misappropriated his image when they ran the 'Think Different'" Campaign. You know the one, where they had a chorus of people show how they all 'think different' by using Apple PCs?
Albert Einstein would have said it is much better to think differently.
Some notes on Linksys, having been a dd-wrt advocate for years. Recently there's your Linksys 610N, and your 160N. Still not clear enough? As some posted prior, carefully read the supported hardware list prior to purchase, also paying careful attention to the hardware version number! On both the 610N and 160N, only version 1 is supported by dd-wrt as I recall. Version 2 hardware is considered to be a long-running Work In-Progress (i.e. no deadline, so shut up about that), and version 3 hardware is a clear No, don't buy it, it is unsupported and probably won't work at all.)
In all my years, I only bricked one, Asus 500 Premium, which can be tricky to initially flash. I currently run Buffalo, older Linksys, and my current favorite, just recently made Hard-To-get in the shops, a 50 euro Netgear WNR834B. Take it home, and use the Netgear stock web interface to flash upgrade to DD-wrt and life is good ever since. A dd-wrt trivial pursuit price (so I bought another, and am glad i did).
I particularly enjoy swapping hardware config profiles between what has in-effect become generic, stable, cheap, dare i say commodity, Linux hardware. It is a great networking platform to standardize on, I think.
One more note, this past weekend, I chained 2 dd-wrts together, to form subnets between home/offices in a co-op building unit. An asterisk server sits behind the 2nd dd-wrt firewall, and seemingly I had nightmare NAT traversal issues for the SIP telephones. Nope, I used the VOIP Milkfish version of dd-wrt on both routers, and configured the asterisk box www.12voip.com trunk with:
outboundproxy=EXTERNALIPADDRESS
No need to open ports on such a fine Milkfish SIP proxy, even subnetted as such, just do as I did. For low-energy-linux prices & stability.
My folks' Asus dd-wrt router gets something like 1 years uptime. They reboot whenever they lose electricity to the house. And they have some kind of line-of-sight wireless internet via www.commspeed.net
My setup is a little different then what the OP is looking for, but it works well for me, in case anyone else is interested.
For 300 euros, I bought an Asus Eee 1000HE several months ago. The honest 6+ hrs battery life plus its weight makes it truly ultraportable, since I don't need to carry any cord or brick in my backpack. The Ubuntu Netbook interface works well on the small screen, and the CPU is efficient running Linux, & Firefox, etc. Skype audio/video doesn't work well I find (the Ubuntu Skype version is old), but Ekiga SIP does. In reality, the hours in-use is greater than just 6, because inevitably I'll get distracted, eat lunch, etc., so the sleep mode kicks in. I relax knowing the little thing has a fully encrypted hard disk, from these instructions:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=7489558&postcount=13 ..and also knowing that it is secure from malware, without the need to operate and pay for anti-virus software.
I cannot imagine running the XP OS (tax) that came with the unit, XP the interface seems like it would be too clumsy on the small screen, and with anti-virus etc. would slow things too much.
I have another 300 euro Compaq 15" notebook with a similarly installed Ubuntu OS so for me, the question when I leave the door for the day is: Do I need the larger screen, or true portability? If I'm just reading docs at the cafe, I love the Asus Eee PC. Each has a Logitech wireless mouse VX450 and a tiny USB nub that remains in-place 24/7. Its critical, (the batteries seem to last 1 year)
One key to everything working out so well, is my Dropbox acct which auto syncs files across home folders. In this way, I use the best suited of my two portable PCs for the day (big screen + brick, or more portable.) (Spider-oak has a better privacy policy than Dropbox though, and I'm meaning to switch). I figure both my Asus and Compaq cost less than half the price of Apple's cheapest notebook. But then in my work, I am happy using Gnome & firefox, etc.
For managing the Win 98 of the OP, I agree Virtual Box is quite capable, free, and runs well on Ubuntu. But not really on the cheap notebooks I described.
This is a problem I have understood for quite some time. The 'management' wants dark age technology, and will resist change; this is clear.
What I do not understand, is where are the lobbyists for the larger document management companies, (Documentum, Hummingbird, Filenet, or any others, and no I'm not endorsing here). Why is this space so quiet from those seemingly interested in Profit$?
The only explanation I can think of, well, assumption actually, is the congress doesn't want to pick say IBM (for example) to manage The Bills while having to say No to all others. I can imagine the competitive bid process for That Contract.
A few years ago, there was a bill that got passed late at night, at the very end of a session of congress. Some joker stuck in some weird provision that everyone objected to, and it got written into law because no one had time to 'look'. Version control would have clearly highlighted such a sneaky move, in time. In fact the first order of business of the new congress was to change that particular aspect of that law. Kudos to whoever can provide more precise details than me.
Let's start by an extremely rapid decline in habitat for a great many and varied species, that we cannot possibly begin to fully appreciate scientifically, let alone model with any accuracy.
...as the unknown future falls.
That site is freakin' awesome! Previously, I had looked everywhere for a Death Ray Tube without success. That was until today.
http://www.unitednuclear.com/deathray.htm
"Phone orders now accepted!
Over 300,000 Satisfied Customers! "
Well I can see mnslinky's script can be used for offline backups, but I don't think rsnapshot does this, (but I haven't studied either in-depth.).
My host uses rsnapshot, and it is very convenient to use.