I've connected to mine over a 9600 cellphone DUN link and while it was pretty slow, you could get things done. I wouldn't want it as the ONLY option, but it's worth looking into as a backup.
+1 on the IP KVM. The one I have uses VNC, and if you have USB cables hooked up & your BIOS supports it, you can actually boot from remote media (ie, point your client to your CD drive, and the KVM emulates the bootable media on the other end). That would be painful over a sat link, but it would be nice to know it was an option if needed. The nice thing is it doesn't mean that you can't have other ways to connect to the individual boxes, it's just another option, which is always good.
I got a decent deal on a Powermonkey Explorer (newegg has them, but for full price). It's a neat device, but you would absolutely not want to be reliant on the solar panel for day to day use. The little battery charges up in an hour or so if you plug it in; from the panel it takes several days of sitting on the windowsill to get to a fully charged state. It's a nice backup, but I honestly never use it anymore. The plug comes with interchangeable international plugs, and there are tips for most phones and gadgets in the kit, so it's great for travel, but you'd need a much bigger solar panel to be able to go off grid for any length of time. I'd be kidding myself if I thought that buying this was in any way "green", and I imagine that you'd be much greener buying a larger set of panels you could tie into the grid.
Re:Security Camera Software Help
on
D.I.Y. Home Security
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· Score: 2, Interesting
+1 on Zoneminder. I bought a capture card & 2 analog cameras for work; it took me an afternoon to set up on a cheap Dell, including a minimal CentOS install. With an 80GB hard drive, I can easily keep 2 months of detected motion events (right now that's pushing 30,000 events, using 75% of the disk). I have to say, the capture cards + analog cameras seem to be much better than the USB webcams I messed with before, though they are more expensive. Start with an old PIII & a webcam, and see how you get on.
My kids used to lock up KDE regularly, though for the last six months or so (since I took them to kubuntu 8.04) it has been ok. And yes, rather than reboot I could have ssh'd into their box, but it's way easier to reboot. For ordinary desktop users, a locked kde or gnome is cause for a reboot.
I also am in favor of less government, which is why I'm an independent. I pointed out that you seem hung up on the black population since you also mentioned it in a post back on October 8th; I think that a cosmopolitan, educated electorate is a better explanation. I also don't like the coded race baiting that I've seen during this election cycle, so maybe I overreacted. Reasonable people can disagree on such things.
Maryland is about as solidly Democrat as you can get -- the huge black majorities in Baltimore City and Prince Georges County have ensured that for decades.
Umm, what? Maryland is 30% African-American. I always understood that the reason we're solidly democratic is because of the highly educated population. For example, Montgomery County has almost 30% of residents over 25 with an advanced degree, 15% African American (since you seem hung up on that), solidly democratic. I'm an independent, btw.
I've used the machines in MD, and I like them. They're pretty clear and easy to use. What I really don't like, however, is the lack of a paper backup. It's such a simple thing, just add a printout which can be easily read and, if needed, optically scanned. That way you can verify the vote totals if there are any questions, and you get the advantages of the machines. I'd much rather they spent the money to add the printers, if possible, than scrap the whole system. If printers can't be added, then ok, get rid of them because there's too much uncertainty over results.
I'm the same. At home, behind a simple router/firewall, I never use AV on any of my windows boxes. I run an online scan every 6 months to a year, and I haven't had any issues so far. If you're not randomly installing crap and opening spam links you should be fine. Firefox is a given, but even with IE I wouldn't sweat it.
+1 for NOD32. I've been happy with the way you never notice it, until it catches something. Just what I want from an antivirus program. We've been running it here for 3 years now, and no issues. It does help that we have a 3rd party scanning our email before it even hits our server, so we rarely get alerts.
Have you looked at what's being discussed here? The Schools Wikipedia is a subset of the real Wikipedia, which has gone through a further level of vetting. This is all pretty basic stuff, and from what I've seen it's all reasonably accurate. I have it set as one of the 10 or so sites my elementary school-aged children can visit. Are there likely inaccuracies? Sure. Do I think that the positive aspects of having such an age appropriate resource easily available outweighs that? Most definitely. And the more teachers we have using and reviewing the material, the better the material is likely to get. The existence if cliques and kooks on Wikipedia doesn't negate the real value of these types of projects.
I don't know - I had a 3Com Audrey sitting in a corner for years, and it was great for quickly looking up something or checking email. The screen was not an issue, even though it was being touched all the time (well, much of the time we used the stylus, but by no means all the time). I would guess that we gave it a wipe every 6 months or so. Something like this would be great on a kitchen counter, for example, though not for $750.
And two seconds is not enough at those speeds (it takes exponentially longer to stop)
The great thing about the two second rule is that it applies at any speed; the distance that you cover in the two seconds just gets longer as the braking distance increases. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-second_rule_(road)
I agree that on a motorcycle, I prefer to be going just a little faster than the traffic around me, so that I'm more in control of the situation. But that doesn't mean that acceleration is going to be my first choice for avoiding an accident - even on a bike, you brake much faster than you accelerate. I do know someone who was struck from behind on a motorcycle at a red light; he was stopped, noticed the car behind wasn't stopping, saw the intersection was clear, and punched it. He still got hit, but the speed differential was less than it would have been. But these are cars we're talking about, and a Ford Focus isn't going to be able to accelerate very well to start with, let alone over 80.
I live in Metro DC. I agree with GPP. You really are better off 90% of the time braking, even though you may lose a car length or two. On a sportbike, with serious acceleration, I still have rarely accelerated out of a potential accident. Most cars can't go 70-90 quickly enough to make a serious difference. Keep your braking distance, even if it means that some yahoo is cutting in front of you every few minutes. Maintain awareness of your surroundings. Be ready to brake first, or to take evasive action if there's space to move to.
I'm buying my electricity from a wind farm, so the bottom line isn't all that matters to me, since I'm paying more each month for that. The financial considerations, added to the fact that I'd have to run pipes through my 70 year old slate roof, to a collector mounted on the same roof, meant that I decided to more efficiently allocate my capital. If you work it out, the "environmental impact" would be minimal; after all, I already established that my gas consumption is so low that the line fees are a significant proportion of my bill. If you're willing to front me $3500, and help me with the plumbing, you can have my gas savings for the next 10 years. Otherwise, I'll find a better use for that money.
If they had a sense of humor the Bulgarian team would rename it Sophia...
But seriously, if it's taken 4 years to get to a "buggy and slow" version, what could possibly be wrong with doing a rewrite while keeping the UI? Presumably a lot of lessons learned could be applied to the new version, and there's nothing stopping the old devs from keeping their fork going. As others point out, that's the beauty of open source.
I'm not so sure. I use gas for hot water only right now; my gas bills are $15-20 a month. A fair chunk of that is the line fee, so if I install a gas stovetop, as my wife insists we will, I'll be paying that anyway. Even if I could disconnect it entirely, it's barely feasible to put in solar hot water & have it pay for itself in 20 years. I was all fired up to do it last year, but when I ran the numbers it just wasn't worth it.
give the driver of a Crown Vic a Renault Clio and watch as they complain.
I remember once sitting in a used car dealership; the next guy over had bought a little Kia 6 months before, and was practically begging the salesman to take it back so he could get a "decent sized car". It pained me to think of how badly he was going to get taken, but all he wanted was to get out of that little thing.
Because we've only been able to get new diesel cars for the last year or so? It takes a while for word to spread. I wouldn't trust the reliability of a VW either, and they seem to have been the first to market.
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I've connected to mine over a 9600 cellphone DUN link and while it was pretty slow, you could get things done. I wouldn't want it as the ONLY option, but it's worth looking into as a backup.
+1 on the IP KVM. The one I have uses VNC, and if you have USB cables hooked up & your BIOS supports it, you can actually boot from remote media (ie, point your client to your CD drive, and the KVM emulates the bootable media on the other end). That would be painful over a sat link, but it would be nice to know it was an option if needed. The nice thing is it doesn't mean that you can't have other ways to connect to the individual boxes, it's just another option, which is always good.
I got a decent deal on a Powermonkey Explorer (newegg has them, but for full price). It's a neat device, but you would absolutely not want to be reliant on the solar panel for day to day use. The little battery charges up in an hour or so if you plug it in; from the panel it takes several days of sitting on the windowsill to get to a fully charged state. It's a nice backup, but I honestly never use it anymore. The plug comes with interchangeable international plugs, and there are tips for most phones and gadgets in the kit, so it's great for travel, but you'd need a much bigger solar panel to be able to go off grid for any length of time. I'd be kidding myself if I thought that buying this was in any way "green", and I imagine that you'd be much greener buying a larger set of panels you could tie into the grid.
+1 on Zoneminder. I bought a capture card & 2 analog cameras for work; it took me an afternoon to set up on a cheap Dell, including a minimal CentOS install. With an 80GB hard drive, I can easily keep 2 months of detected motion events (right now that's pushing 30,000 events, using 75% of the disk). I have to say, the capture cards + analog cameras seem to be much better than the USB webcams I messed with before, though they are more expensive. Start with an old PIII & a webcam, and see how you get on.
My kids used to lock up KDE regularly, though for the last six months or so (since I took them to kubuntu 8.04) it has been ok. And yes, rather than reboot I could have ssh'd into their box, but it's way easier to reboot. For ordinary desktop users, a locked kde or gnome is cause for a reboot.
I also am in favor of less government, which is why I'm an independent. I pointed out that you seem hung up on the black population since you also mentioned it in a post back on October 8th; I think that a cosmopolitan, educated electorate is a better explanation. I also don't like the coded race baiting that I've seen during this election cycle, so maybe I overreacted. Reasonable people can disagree on such things.
Maryland is about as solidly Democrat as you can get -- the huge black majorities in Baltimore City and Prince Georges County have ensured that for decades.
Umm, what? Maryland is 30% African-American. I always understood that the reason we're solidly democratic is because of the highly educated population. For example, Montgomery County has almost 30% of residents over 25 with an advanced degree, 15% African American (since you seem hung up on that), solidly democratic. I'm an independent, btw.
I've used the machines in MD, and I like them. They're pretty clear and easy to use. What I really don't like, however, is the lack of a paper backup. It's such a simple thing, just add a printout which can be easily read and, if needed, optically scanned. That way you can verify the vote totals if there are any questions, and you get the advantages of the machines. I'd much rather they spent the money to add the printers, if possible, than scrap the whole system. If printers can't be added, then ok, get rid of them because there's too much uncertainty over results.
Besides, you can never diagnose with 100 percent certainty that you don't have a rootkit...
Antivirus software won't help with that anyway, you can never be 100% sure. And the recent Windows vulnerability won't get past a simple router.
I'm the same. At home, behind a simple router/firewall, I never use AV on any of my windows boxes. I run an online scan every 6 months to a year, and I haven't had any issues so far. If you're not randomly installing crap and opening spam links you should be fine. Firefox is a given, but even with IE I wouldn't sweat it.
+1 for NOD32. I've been happy with the way you never notice it, until it catches something. Just what I want from an antivirus program. We've been running it here for 3 years now, and no issues. It does help that we have a 3rd party scanning our email before it even hits our server, so we rarely get alerts.
Have you looked at what's being discussed here? The Schools Wikipedia is a subset of the real Wikipedia, which has gone through a further level of vetting. This is all pretty basic stuff, and from what I've seen it's all reasonably accurate. I have it set as one of the 10 or so sites my elementary school-aged children can visit. Are there likely inaccuracies? Sure. Do I think that the positive aspects of having such an age appropriate resource easily available outweighs that? Most definitely. And the more teachers we have using and reviewing the material, the better the material is likely to get. The existence if cliques and kooks on Wikipedia doesn't negate the real value of these types of projects.
If you can double your budget, you can get an Openmoko ($399).
I don't know - I had a 3Com Audrey sitting in a corner for years, and it was great for quickly looking up something or checking email. The screen was not an issue, even though it was being touched all the time (well, much of the time we used the stylus, but by no means all the time). I would guess that we gave it a wipe every 6 months or so. Something like this would be great on a kitchen counter, for example, though not for $750.
The alternative forms of energy gets TONS more money anyway, with far less regulation, and almost ZERO requirement of actually doing anything useful.
From this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Policy_Act_of_2005
I'd say that Nuclear & fossil get $7.1 billion, while all renewables + conservation get $7.4 billion; not tons more, and not an order of magnitude as the AC above suggests.
If the charts on this page are to believed:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/09/us-energy-subsidies-updated.html
then the share of money over the period 1950-2006 devoted to renewables comes to 6%.
And two seconds is not enough at those speeds (it takes exponentially longer to stop)
The great thing about the two second rule is that it applies at any speed; the distance that you cover in the two seconds just gets longer as the braking distance increases.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-second_rule_(road)
I agree that on a motorcycle, I prefer to be going just a little faster than the traffic around me, so that I'm more in control of the situation. But that doesn't mean that acceleration is going to be my first choice for avoiding an accident - even on a bike, you brake much faster than you accelerate. I do know someone who was struck from behind on a motorcycle at a red light; he was stopped, noticed the car behind wasn't stopping, saw the intersection was clear, and punched it. He still got hit, but the speed differential was less than it would have been. But these are cars we're talking about, and a Ford Focus isn't going to be able to accelerate very well to start with, let alone over 80.
I live in Metro DC. I agree with GPP. You really are better off 90% of the time braking, even though you may lose a car length or two. On a sportbike, with serious acceleration, I still have rarely accelerated out of a potential accident. Most cars can't go 70-90 quickly enough to make a serious difference. Keep your braking distance, even if it means that some yahoo is cutting in front of you every few minutes. Maintain awareness of your surroundings. Be ready to brake first, or to take evasive action if there's space to move to.
Well, in that case, the kid shouldn't overtake.
Today I installed the September release of some ridulously expensive software and it required Net 1.0.
In my experience, the more ridiculously expensive software is, the crappier it will be...
I'm buying my electricity from a wind farm, so the bottom line isn't all that matters to me, since I'm paying more each month for that. The financial considerations, added to the fact that I'd have to run pipes through my 70 year old slate roof, to a collector mounted on the same roof, meant that I decided to more efficiently allocate my capital. If you work it out, the "environmental impact" would be minimal; after all, I already established that my gas consumption is so low that the line fees are a significant proportion of my bill. If you're willing to front me $3500, and help me with the plumbing, you can have my gas savings for the next 10 years. Otherwise, I'll find a better use for that money.
If they had a sense of humor the Bulgarian team would rename it Sophia...
But seriously, if it's taken 4 years to get to a "buggy and slow" version, what could possibly be wrong with doing a rewrite while keeping the UI? Presumably a lot of lessons learned could be applied to the new version, and there's nothing stopping the old devs from keeping their fork going. As others point out, that's the beauty of open source.
I'm not so sure. I use gas for hot water only right now; my gas bills are $15-20 a month. A fair chunk of that is the line fee, so if I install a gas stovetop, as my wife insists we will, I'll be paying that anyway. Even if I could disconnect it entirely, it's barely feasible to put in solar hot water & have it pay for itself in 20 years. I was all fired up to do it last year, but when I ran the numbers it just wasn't worth it.
give the driver of a Crown Vic a Renault Clio and watch as they complain.
I remember once sitting in a used car dealership; the next guy over had bought a little Kia 6 months before, and was practically begging the salesman to take it back so he could get a "decent sized car". It pained me to think of how badly he was going to get taken, but all he wanted was to get out of that little thing.
Because we've only been able to get new diesel cars for the last year or so? It takes a while for word to spread. I wouldn't trust the reliability of a VW either, and they seem to have been the first to market.