Fuck the speech bubble, that's WAY more distracting. I have my Kopete windows in tabs and when someone msg's me and a window's not open, the kopete systray icon just spins. If someone I'm speaking to msg's me and it's minimized/unfocused it just blinks a few times and then stays "inverse" in the taskbar. Ahhh, sweet bliss.
I miss Psi though. That was an IM app to be reconed with.:-) Actually I still run it but I could never find a stable MSN transport so I gave in and ran kopete.
Actually, the motherboard memory and chipset is "cut off" when the SIMA card is inserted. If you'll look at the SIMA card provided in the article you can see that the RAM is right on the card. PCIe is an emerging standard, I suspect that you will have a number of years before you have to worry about losing it.
As much as I'd never buy one of these, it does appear like they did their homework.
I too use MythTV with Slackware (10.1) but I find that mythfrontend crashes now and again, or mplayer ends up hanging if a video file is kind of iffy, requiring me to kill it by hand.
I am, however netbooting the box, and one infuriating problem I've discovered that I can't seem to get rid of is "nfs: stale file handle" messages that appear on the box (remember it netboots, / is on nfs) -- if I ssh to to the box and "ls/" a couple of times things go green again and it works again. I can't for the life of me figure this out and the message is so generic that the online resources I have aren't much help.
You are an remarkably shortsighted individual. Light actuation has all kinds of applications where the actuating device and the actuated device need to be isolated (distance, electrically, mechanically) from each other. Research may not have obvious applications but that does not mean that the research is useless or impractical!
I agree; I can't believe how bad the whole audio player "subsystem" of KDE is, and I've been using KDE since the early 3.x stages. noatun seems to be MIA. juk is nice but can't read SMB shares directly (I have to mount the fs or it tries to copy every song locally to play). amarok seems to work with SMB shares (with gstreamer) but it has odd little glitches. kaffeine can kind of do it too... I mean christ... PICK ONE... each has features I like, why can't the features be made into plugins for ONE xmms or winamp-like player?
web/file browsing seems rock-solid. Konqueror kicks serious ass. It'd be amazing if it could take firefox plugins. The ioslaves model is pure heaven, IMO. IM seems to work well, office stuff (I use openoffice but koffice is using the same formats now), email/PIM is handled (Kontact rocks)... why such a fucking mess with the media players?
Nonsense; it's because you have the source, can either fix it yourself or hire practically anyone to do so and actually have a shot at getting the fix in to the codebase at the next release. You simply can't do that with closed-source software, big vendors or small.
Why I moved off of Exchanve Server -- I wanted my data in open formats and out of the "black box" that Exchange Server is. We moved to Exchange4Linux, which stores everything (and I mean everything) in a PostgreSQL database (18G and growing). SMTP is whatever you want, but Postfix is what they recommend. I've tried practically every Exchange replacement out there (SLES/SLOX, OpenExchange, a plethora of web-based crap, Bynari, Steltor (now Oracle's) CorporateTime, Hitachi's solution, etc., etc.) and this one is the (clear) winner in my eyes. The entire thing is written in Python, including the Outlook connector, and everything but the connector is open-source. (Outlook connectors are EUR$50/seat with discounts for volume). We still run Outlook on the desktops since that is the user interface and many here still want it, but as far as the backend is concerned, I couldn't be happier now. There is something just plain cool about being able to run arbitrary SQL queries over all of the company's emails, contacts, todos, journals, you name it... We have it tying in to our Asterisk PBX as well so, for example, the service guy who's on call gets the emergency page. The service department just maintains their Pager Calendar and I do a lookup to see who's on duty.
E4L isn't without its warts (the IMAP server is still in early development, no POP or LDAP yet), but being Open Source and also being in active development, these get polished or cut out (as necessary) in time. And I can add/change the system and get my changes contributed back. I don't have to worry about where my data went to or if the system ever crashes how to recover the data. If some weird-ass situation comes up and I need to correlate my data in some unforseen way... well now I can, and I don't need some kind of screwed-up and possibly commercial API to get it done. And most importantly for me, I don't have to worry about the system changing or being eliminated due to some other company's paradigm shift.
>You need far stronger static magnetic fields to >damage a drive without opening it than you can buy.
Mod parent up. He's spot-on here.
Actually just misguided. Static magnetic fields won't do shit to most magnetic media. It's the magnetic flux (change in magnetic polarity) that puts the bits there in the first place, and it's the magnetic flux that will scramble them faster than a tornado through a chicken farm.
I haven't tried it myself but I am willing to bet that a standard tape bulk eraser will render most hard drives inoperable, as it will not only zap the data but also the zone markers that are magnetically placed on the media by the drive's low-level format. That aluminum cover ain't magnetic so there's no magnetic "short circuit" around the platters and the flux lines that the bulk eraser's generating will penetrate deep and the rapid flux change it imposes on the media will make gone any order in the magnetic patterns that were there.
Consequently that's why the rare-earth magnets in hard drives don't do much to the platters -- it's a magnetically closed circuit, and there are no stray flux lines to cross and cause a flux change on the platter. The only stray flux lines are the ones very specifically put there by the GMR heads.
Static discharge very very infrequently destroys sensitive components immediately. Generally you'll find that static discharge weakens the component (breakdown of the insulation layer in the MOS devices) and causes intermittents, which become less and less intermittent as the device is further subjected to static discharge.
Now, having said that, when you're working on a PC you are generally touching the case and the case is generally plugged in to a grounded outlet, so you're almost always at or near the same potential as the case, which is generally at ground potential. Where you generally find problems is when the device or you is at different potentials (taking a video card or DIMM out of the gray antistatic bag and setting it down, then picking up the phone/dealing with a customer and coming back to it later without regrounding yourself) -- it's stupidly easy to build up several hundred volts of static potential, and that's not enough to really feel either.
I've also been in the biz for over a decade... it's not as cut and dry as you suggest. Keeping your environment relatively humid and minimizing static producers (rubber shoes, carpet, etc.) goes a long way. ionizers also help.
Is there a PPC device that lasts longer than about 8hrs on battery? My Tungsten E works a full week and a half with daily use (look at what's to do, look up contact numbers, scribble a note kind of work).
That's why I'm not leaving the platform. It's easy to work with, it works very well and the battery life is pretty damn good.
Putting everything (by everything I mean business logic) in the DB is the only sane way to keep your data consistent across multiple access methods. You simply can't thow data at a DB and then try to code and maintain consistent business logic in a half dozen client apps. You might be able to get away with a shared client access lib but even that can get messy.
Let's face it: Your data's in the DB. Why pull it all into the application to work on some small subset? Do all the queries and joins and clauses and increments in the database. The DB knows best where the data is and how you're going to be tinkering with it (so long as you give it sufficent hints), so it's the only sane method to access your data in a logical fashion. That's precisely why all these scripting languages and language interfaces exist.
I too use XML-RPC and SOAP (moreso the latter it seems, as XML-RPC is a little too light IMO) to access my data, but you can bet your sweet bippy I'm having the DB do as much as possible in order to transfer as little data as possible across my app-db link.
Actually it's all the rain that's in the distance between the satellite and the dish reflector itself that kills the signal. The small space between the reflector and the LNB is where the signal's strongest. And the "socks" are there to keep snow, squirrels, birds, etc. from collecting in that small space and absorbing the faint signals.
Exchange4Linux is an open-protocol, open-source Exchange Server replacement. It's written in Python, and the Outlook connector, while also written in Python, is not for free, but reasonably priced (small quantity price is $50 IIRC). Everything, and I mean everything is stored in a PostgreSQL database. There is something very, very cool about being able to run arbitrary SQL queries on your todos, calendars, contacts and even emails. It brings a level of data integration together that sometimes makes me want to weep. Perfect example: Our customer service department has a rotating "on-call" person. They have a calendar in which they organize who's turn it is. I query the DB once a day to let my Asterisk server know who to redirect the call to. Totally seamless, and that's just a small small example.
Neuberger-Hughes, the company responsible for Exchange4Linux also does the whole turnkey solution for those who want someone to yell at but still want the peace of mind that having your data in open software can only provide.
I don't work for them, I am just a happy user of their software.
You don't do exact byte-for-byte comparisons. You do regular signal analysis and see how close the audio is to each other. If it exceeds a given deviation, you alert them.
And yes, it's not dead as in doornail simple, but it is a fairly straightforward problem.
Exchange4Linux does exactly this. Works pretty well, we've got a shitload of email (videos too), 5000+ contacts and all manner of data sitting in a PostgreSQL database.
It's NICE being able to execute SQL queries on your aggreate communications data. Perfect example: Our Asterisk head-end system knows which of our customer service people is on pager duty with an SQL query which looks at their service calendar.:-)
Oh yes, memories... For me it was Ice-Nine (519) 888-0085 and New Gold Dream, whose number I do not remember... I was a remote op on both the most hated BBS in the area and also the most well liked... I miss those days.:-(
I get the fact that you can't do that with biometric data because the data never is exactly the same, i.e., the one-way hash of the fingerprint you use to create the account won't be the same as the one-way hash created as you log on. And to do the comparison otherwise you'd need to load the data into memory, which is like loading a password, which is bad
It appears as though you're unfamilliar with the technology.
At least with the fingerprint sensors I used (Authentec) the goal was to genearate a biometric signature and toss that around. When you scanned your finger it went over the map and created a digest which described the features of your fingerprint (whorls, swirls, forks, etc.) and the relative distance and orientation from each other. THIS is what makes up your fingerprint's... uh.. fingerprint. You don't store the bitmap image at all. Similarly when you scan for access, the same process is repeated and the fingerprint maps are compared, not the images.
So yes, it should be entirely possible to do what you want. PAM on its own is an unholy beast though. There was a great article at one point which detailed exactly why PAM was a solution looking for a problem, but I've long since lost it.
In the business world, PDFs are used for non-editable documents. Specs, Purchase Orders, Invoices, etc. However Acrobat makes for a relatively featureless word processor, so it does not make sense to use it for much else.
Funny, we've been using PDF forms for several years now to create our equipment rating plates.
I don't get the point of taking the time to integrate a keyboard into a device like that and splitting it into a thumb-typer arrangement with itty-bitty buttons (the thumb is not the most agile or delicate of bodyparts).
While I agree that the keys seem small, the thumb actually is very agile. How else do you suppose people could hold and enter data into the device? I think the arrangement is very clever.
Let me ask you this then: Do you feel that protecting processes or hardware is a good idea? How do inventors recoup their research and development investment if the process is trivial to perform once all the work in figuring out how to do it profitably is done? If you do feel that this is a good idea, why is software different?
I'm not trolling; this is the very crux of the whole software patent issue, in my mind. Why is software different? It's *not* mathematical formulas. It's *not* protected by copyright. And I'm *not* talking about stupid patents, as I think that it should be financially painful to try and push that shit through the system in the first place, in any field of study.
I'm not hostile, I justam really frustrated that people think that software patents = stupidity patents. They're not the same. Stupidity patents occur in hardware too, see that recent ipod bay in a recent/. article.
I am still unconvinced that copyright is enough to protect software. Copyright just prevents the copying of a work. It does not protect the nature of the work. Take JPEG compression for instance. It's a novel, nontrivial method to achieve lossy compression on images. Copyright would protect the inventor from someone character-for-character copying the source. It would not prevent a reverse eningeered copy nor a rewrite using similar but not exact methods.
Just as trademark laws protect exact copies of hardware (well logos, I pre-emptively agree this isn't a perfect comparison), copyright protects exact copies of software. Neither protect the methods used to create the work, which is what patent is all about.
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Fuck the speech bubble, that's WAY more distracting. I have my Kopete windows in tabs and when someone msg's me and a window's not open, the kopete systray icon just spins. If someone I'm speaking to msg's me and it's minimized/unfocused it just blinks a few times and then stays "inverse" in the taskbar. Ahhh, sweet bliss.
I miss Psi though. That was an IM app to be reconed with. :-) Actually I still run it but I could never find a stable MSN transport so I gave in and ran kopete.
Actually, the motherboard memory and chipset is "cut off" when the SIMA card is inserted. If you'll look at the SIMA card provided in the article you can see that the RAM is right on the card. PCIe is an emerging standard, I suspect that you will have a number of years before you have to worry about losing it.
As much as I'd never buy one of these, it does appear like they did their homework.
artificial sweeteners (I am one of the "urban myth" people who gets excruciating migraines if I ingest nutrasweet.)
Nope, I get bad bad headaches from aspartame. Sucralose doesn't do it, and neither does regular or brown sugar.
I too use MythTV with Slackware (10.1) but I find that mythfrontend crashes now and again, or mplayer ends up hanging if a video file is kind of iffy, requiring me to kill it by hand.
I am, however netbooting the box, and one infuriating problem I've discovered that I can't seem to get rid of is "nfs: stale file handle" messages that appear on the box (remember it netboots, / is on nfs) -- if I ssh to to the box and "ls /" a couple of times things go green again and it works again. I can't for the life of me figure this out and the message is so generic that the online resources I have aren't much help.
Other than that, yes, myth Just Works for me.
You are an remarkably shortsighted individual. Light actuation has all kinds of applications where the actuating device and the actuated device need to be isolated (distance, electrically, mechanically) from each other. Research may not have obvious applications but that does not mean that the research is useless or impractical!
Actually it's a "Power" button, much like any other electronic piece of equipment these days.
I agree; I can't believe how bad the whole audio player "subsystem" of KDE is, and I've been using KDE since the early 3.x stages. noatun seems to be MIA. juk is nice but can't read SMB shares directly (I have to mount the fs or it tries to copy every song locally to play). amarok seems to work with SMB shares (with gstreamer) but it has odd little glitches. kaffeine can kind of do it too... I mean christ... PICK ONE... each has features I like, why can't the features be made into plugins for ONE xmms or winamp-like player?
web/file browsing seems rock-solid. Konqueror kicks serious ass. It'd be amazing if it could take firefox plugins. The ioslaves model is pure heaven, IMO. IM seems to work well, office stuff (I use openoffice but koffice is using the same formats now), email/PIM is handled (Kontact rocks)... why such a fucking mess with the media players?
Only because of a smaller user-base.
Nonsense; it's because you have the source, can either fix it yourself or hire practically anyone to do so and actually have a shot at getting the fix in to the codebase at the next release. You simply can't do that with closed-source software, big vendors or small.
Why I moved off of Exchanve Server -- I wanted my data in open formats and out of the "black box" that Exchange Server is. We moved to Exchange4Linux, which stores everything (and I mean everything) in a PostgreSQL database (18G and growing). SMTP is whatever you want, but Postfix is what they recommend. I've tried practically every Exchange replacement out there (SLES/SLOX, OpenExchange, a plethora of web-based crap, Bynari, Steltor (now Oracle's) CorporateTime, Hitachi's solution, etc., etc.) and this one is the (clear) winner in my eyes. The entire thing is written in Python, including the Outlook connector, and everything but the connector is open-source. (Outlook connectors are EUR$50/seat with discounts for volume). We still run Outlook on the desktops since that is the user interface and many here still want it, but as far as the backend is concerned, I couldn't be happier now. There is something just plain cool about being able to run arbitrary SQL queries over all of the company's emails, contacts, todos, journals, you name it... We have it tying in to our Asterisk PBX as well so, for example, the service guy who's on call gets the emergency page. The service department just maintains their Pager Calendar and I do a lookup to see who's on duty.
E4L isn't without its warts (the IMAP server is still in early development, no POP or LDAP yet), but being Open Source and also being in active development, these get polished or cut out (as necessary) in time. And I can add/change the system and get my changes contributed back. I don't have to worry about where my data went to or if the system ever crashes how to recover the data. If some weird-ass situation comes up and I need to correlate my data in some unforseen way... well now I can, and I don't need some kind of screwed-up and possibly commercial API to get it done. And most importantly for me, I don't have to worry about the system changing or being eliminated due to some other company's paradigm shift.
>You need far stronger static magnetic fields to
>damage a drive without opening it than you can buy.
Mod parent up. He's spot-on here.
Actually just misguided. Static magnetic fields won't do shit to most magnetic media. It's the magnetic flux (change in magnetic polarity) that puts the bits there in the first place, and it's the magnetic flux that will scramble them faster than a tornado through a chicken farm.
I haven't tried it myself but I am willing to bet that a standard tape bulk eraser will render most hard drives inoperable, as it will not only zap the data but also the zone markers that are magnetically placed on the media by the drive's low-level format. That aluminum cover ain't magnetic so there's no magnetic "short circuit" around the platters and the flux lines that the bulk eraser's generating will penetrate deep and the rapid flux change it imposes on the media will make gone any order in the magnetic patterns that were there.
Consequently that's why the rare-earth magnets in hard drives don't do much to the platters -- it's a magnetically closed circuit, and there are no stray flux lines to cross and cause a flux change on the platter. The only stray flux lines are the ones very specifically put there by the GMR heads.
Sorry, but you're full of shit.
Static discharge very very infrequently destroys sensitive components immediately. Generally you'll find that static discharge weakens the component (breakdown of the insulation layer in the MOS devices) and causes intermittents, which become less and less intermittent as the device is further subjected to static discharge.
Now, having said that, when you're working on a PC you are generally touching the case and the case is generally plugged in to a grounded outlet, so you're almost always at or near the same potential as the case, which is generally at ground potential. Where you generally find problems is when the device or you is at different potentials (taking a video card or DIMM out of the gray antistatic bag and setting it down, then picking up the phone/dealing with a customer and coming back to it later without regrounding yourself) -- it's stupidly easy to build up several hundred volts of static potential, and that's not enough to really feel either.
I've also been in the biz for over a decade... it's not as cut and dry as you suggest. Keeping your environment relatively humid and minimizing static producers (rubber shoes, carpet, etc.) goes a long way. ionizers also help.
Is there a PPC device that lasts longer than about 8hrs on battery? My Tungsten E works a full week and a half with daily use (look at what's to do, look up contact numbers, scribble a note kind of work).
That's why I'm not leaving the platform. It's easy to work with, it works very well and the battery life is pretty damn good.
I disagree.
Putting everything (by everything I mean business logic) in the DB is the only sane way to keep your data consistent across multiple access methods. You simply can't thow data at a DB and then try to code and maintain consistent business logic in a half dozen client apps. You might be able to get away with a shared client access lib but even that can get messy.
Let's face it: Your data's in the DB. Why pull it all into the application to work on some small subset? Do all the queries and joins and clauses and increments in the database. The DB knows best where the data is and how you're going to be tinkering with it (so long as you give it sufficent hints), so it's the only sane method to access your data in a logical fashion. That's precisely why all these scripting languages and language interfaces exist.
I too use XML-RPC and SOAP (moreso the latter it seems, as XML-RPC is a little too light IMO) to access my data, but you can bet your sweet bippy I'm having the DB do as much as possible in order to transfer as little data as possible across my app-db link.
As are you. :-p
Actually it's all the rain that's in the distance between the satellite and the dish reflector itself that kills the signal. The small space between the reflector and the LNB is where the signal's strongest. And the "socks" are there to keep snow, squirrels, birds, etc. from collecting in that small space and absorbing the faint signals.
Exchange4Linux is an open-protocol, open-source Exchange Server replacement. It's written in Python, and the Outlook connector, while also written in Python, is not for free, but reasonably priced (small quantity price is $50 IIRC). Everything, and I mean everything is stored in a PostgreSQL database. There is something very, very cool about being able to run arbitrary SQL queries on your todos, calendars, contacts and even emails. It brings a level of data integration together that sometimes makes me want to weep. Perfect example: Our customer service department has a rotating "on-call" person. They have a calendar in which they organize who's turn it is. I query the DB once a day to let my Asterisk server know who to redirect the call to. Totally seamless, and that's just a small small example.
Neuberger-Hughes, the company responsible for Exchange4Linux also does the whole turnkey solution for those who want someone to yell at but still want the peace of mind that having your data in open software can only provide.
I don't work for them, I am just a happy user of their software.
I'm stuck with my current crippled version of QuickBooks. Any open source equivalents out there that you'd recommend?
Appgen MyBooks Professional. Not affiliated with them, just a customer who's also looking at their AccPAC killer for his day job, Appgen Custom Suite.
Sorry, he isn't wrong.
You don't do exact byte-for-byte comparisons. You do regular signal analysis and see how close the audio is to each other. If it exceeds a given deviation, you alert them.
And yes, it's not dead as in doornail simple, but it is a fairly straightforward problem.
Exchange4Linux does exactly this. Works pretty well, we've got a shitload of email (videos too), 5000+ contacts and all manner of data sitting in a PostgreSQL database.
It's NICE being able to execute SQL queries on your aggreate communications data. Perfect example: Our Asterisk head-end system knows which of our customer service people is on pager duty with an SQL query which looks at their service calendar. :-)
Oh yes, memories... For me it was Ice-Nine (519) 888-0085 and New Gold Dream, whose number I do not remember... I was a remote op on both the most hated BBS in the area and also the most well liked... I miss those days. :-(
I get the fact that you can't do that with biometric data because the data never is exactly the same, i.e., the one-way hash of the fingerprint you use to create the account won't be the same as the one-way hash created as you log on. And to do the comparison otherwise you'd need to load the data into memory, which is like loading a password, which is bad
It appears as though you're unfamilliar with the technology.
At least with the fingerprint sensors I used (Authentec) the goal was to genearate a biometric signature and toss that around. When you scanned your finger it went over the map and created a digest which described the features of your fingerprint (whorls, swirls, forks, etc.) and the relative distance and orientation from each other. THIS is what makes up your fingerprint's... uh.. fingerprint. You don't store the bitmap image at all. Similarly when you scan for access, the same process is repeated and the fingerprint maps are compared, not the images.
So yes, it should be entirely possible to do what you want. PAM on its own is an unholy beast though. There was a great article at one point which detailed exactly why PAM was a solution looking for a problem, but I've long since lost it.
In the business world, PDFs are used for non-editable documents. Specs, Purchase Orders, Invoices, etc. However Acrobat makes for a relatively featureless word processor, so it does not make sense to use it for much else.
Funny, we've been using PDF forms for several years now to create our equipment rating plates.
I don't get the point of taking the time to integrate a keyboard into a device like that and splitting it into a thumb-typer arrangement with itty-bitty buttons (the thumb is not the most agile or delicate of bodyparts).
While I agree that the keys seem small, the thumb actually is very agile. How else do you suppose people could hold and enter data into the device? I think the arrangement is very clever.
Let me ask you this then: Do you feel that protecting processes or hardware is a good idea? How do inventors recoup their research and development investment if the process is trivial to perform once all the work in figuring out how to do it profitably is done? If you do feel that this is a good idea, why is software different?
I'm not trolling; this is the very crux of the whole software patent issue, in my mind. Why is software different? It's *not* mathematical formulas. It's *not* protected by copyright. And I'm *not* talking about stupid patents, as I think that it should be financially painful to try and push that shit through the system in the first place, in any field of study.
I'm not hostile, I justam really frustrated that people think that software patents = stupidity patents. They're not the same. Stupidity patents occur in hardware too, see that recent ipod bay in a recent /. article.
I am still unconvinced that copyright is enough to protect software. Copyright just prevents the copying of a work. It does not protect the nature of the work. Take JPEG compression for instance. It's a novel, nontrivial method to achieve lossy compression on images. Copyright would protect the inventor from someone character-for-character copying the source. It would not prevent a reverse eningeered copy nor a rewrite using similar but not exact methods.
Just as trademark laws protect exact copies of hardware (well logos, I pre-emptively agree this isn't a perfect comparison), copyright protects exact copies of software. Neither protect the methods used to create the work, which is what patent is all about.