Drupal, as would most any other PHP app like Joomla or Wordpress, works fine under lighttp and nginx. The effort goes intro translating whatever apache-centric config for the tool into lighttp or nginx config, and this effort would be required regardless of whether you use Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, etc.
Indeed, I run a Drupal portal under nginx + fastcgi-php + sqlite to get fast page loads.
Re:Drupal is impossible unless you're a consultant
on
Drupal Multimedia
·
· Score: 4, Informative
There is a excellent calendar module right here, which leverages heavily off of functionality provided by other modules (as is Drupal convention). From a standpoint of functionality, available features, and extendability, it's better than anything I found with Joomla. http://drupal.org/project/calendar
I've used this module extensively, out-of-the-box most of the time, and yes, I do so as a paid consultant from time to time.
Besides that, since Drupal tries to provide a framework for anyone and everyone to contribute pieces via 3rd-party modules, it will be as chaotic, diverse, and even inscrutable as one would expect a bazaar to be. Still, it enables that bazaar to exist in the first place.
I'm amazed that data centers have yet to acknowledged (as regulated) as heavy industry, what with their power consumption, size, and even pollution via hot air expelled from massive cooling plants. It was rarely surprising when GM, Ford and Chrysler would relocate their plants to capitalize on laxer environmental regulation, cheaper labor, or lower taxes. Somehow it's surprising when Microsoft feels similar motivations to move its massive plants?
If simply rolling along a public paved surface (whether powered or not) becomes a taxable event, then why limit it just to cars?
Despite the heroic efforts of the selfless folks in your local transportation lobby, roads, bridges, and other elements of the asphalt jungle are still really darned expensive. Each penny you can squeeze out to offset the destructive effects of every tire rotation is one less 1/1000th of a pothole, the lobby would like you to know.
Perhaps the better response is "Something that might get more Americans to ride pedal-operated aircraft." Very little lateral traversal of pavement there.
Unfortunately, this wireless service is basically subsidized by revenue from wired customers. Comcast is not expecting to meet its expected profit margins by offering this service, so the company assuages its apprehensions by binding the service to its existing customer base (who no doubt are thrilled about the opportunity to pay Comcast even more money).
Sure, you could ask insightful questions like "Gee, are Comcast's expected profit margins maybe not sustainable?" or "Don't you see the potential size of a wireless-only customer base?" However, you're likely to get a more coherent answer to these questions from a brick wall than from Comcast.
A 20km-tall inflatable structure is indeed admirable, and a realistic step in the right direction towards building real super-structures like a space elevator, a floating Buckyball, etc.
An novel approach for non-rocket launch, which may be more possible with the current state of technology than a space elevator (in that it requires less quantity of unobtanium), is a launch loop. It uses reactive centrifugal force to hold itself aloft. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop
I'm playing with mesh node wifi routers, setting up a small mesh near where I live.
Something like this would be awesome as an itty-bitty squid server, to cache users' commonly browsed web content within the mesh itself. The open question would be whether the cache itself should reside entirely on a RAM disk to keep down access times, or whether the flash disk is fast enough. I'm guessing the former.
It's sad to see a detailed point-by-point response, whether the popular option of this thread agrees with it or not, be modded down as 'troll,' The involuntary nervous system now extends to typing fingertips, as per the latest evolution?
Yes, the last mile tends to be the most expensive segment of any conventional resident broadband scheme in this country, because of our infrastructure's unhealthy dependence on unsustainable, top-down approaches. Why does every wired home need a twisted pair and associated telephone pole forest when ad-hoc wireless schemes like mesh node wifi could suffice for perhaps 80-90% of people affected?
Federally subsidized DSL, should it ever come about, would indeed increase broadband access in direly underserved markets like the inner cities and rural communities. But it would be expensive (we'd just be using taxpayer $$$ to further build out the top-down systems described above), it would most certainly not be competitive or innovative, and the actual details of its implementation would still be left to the very same telco monopolies we gripe about now.
Wireless technologies like mesh node wifi, WiMax, possibly even White Space, whenever that appears, could readily serve urban and suburban markets. We already use churches, post offices, school, etc as neighborhood polling places, why not also as uplinks for the local wireless broadband presence? It also need not be gov't mediated. Imagine running these wireless presences as neighborhood co-ops, similar to the century-old tradition of agricultural co-ops, or even wireless kibbutzes.
Lest we steer ourselves into a another precarious situation like the current one with fossil fuels, perhaps it would be good to look at the issues with acquiring necessary raw materials, should the current domestic battery market expand by an order of magnitude.
Assuming many of the batteries manufactured still require cobalt, then increasing the demand of that material by 10x would almost certainly place peculiar political demands on the country that provides most of the world's cobalt: the Congo. To paraphrase a commenter on the original article, will we end up "bringing democracy" to the Congo as we just did in Iraq?
What about cadmium? NiCd Batteries already represent the majority of the world's use of cadmium. It's a by-product of zinc manufacturing, and poisonous in high concentration. Following a trend already everpresent the local auto industry, more manufactured cadmium comes from our neighbors to the North and South than from us, even tho we have the largest market of the 3 countries. To what extent would existing environmental problems with cadmium manufacture be exacerbated by the damand increasing 10x?
Finally there is nickel. The company that provides 20% of the world's supply, Norilsk Nickel, also happens to reside in one of the world's most polluted areas. How would both the local environmental damage, AND the US's relationship with Russia, be altered by a 10x increase our demand for nickel?
I read on Ars Technica that Google, Dell, Intel, and Microsoft submitted a proof-of-concept prototype to the FCC for testing. Now that this (de)regulation has been approved, any thoughts on who will be the first to roll out White Space devices.
It takes *very little* current to short a FET gate, i.e. microamps or less. Indeed, compare the geometry of these whiskers to the tracks etched on silicon. Not every bit of metal exposed on a PCB will carry current large enough to fuse these whiskers before they cause disruption. Furthermore, chip-scale assembly techniques likes BGA will give you plenty of areas with large blobs of solder within convenient whisker distance of each other.
As referenced in another comment, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center does indeed seem pretty concerned: http://nepp.nasa.gov/WHISKER/
This article is almost certainly a hoax. The thrust available from pressurized propellant is in no way adequate for any body to even approach escape velocity. The article mentions the inventor's ongoing refinements to the bottle's capacity and structural integrity (elongation, kevlar, carbon fiber), along with the bit about using multiple stages. However, all these things amount to adding weight to the missile, which means more propellant at higher pressure (= more weight), which mean more structural enhancements (= even more weight). The inventor will not be able to achieve necessary thrust vs. weight ratio to attain any kind of significant altitude.
There is a very simple reason why rocketry traditionally uses combustible propellants: the combustion creates superheated gases at pressures far exceeding the pressure at which the propellant is stored in the onboard tanks, effectively converting chemical energy into massive amounts of thrust. This pop bottle rocket does not enjoy the same energy conversion process.
If the inventor could devise a way to store superheated plasma (i.e. hotter than core of the sun) in a small, low-weight package that requires little to no containment energy, then yes, perhaps it could escape the atmosphere, but he'd need something much more elaborate than a bike pump to the charge it up.
There is the common practice of scanning a filesystem (whether on CD or not) for virus signatures via whatever anti-virus app suits your fancy, but this is an inherently reactionary approach. You can only scan for the virii you're aware of. Why not compute MD5 checkums or something similar over the CD image? Seems like that would be much simpler and more elegant than routinely checking your images against an ever expanding (and always incomplete) list of virii fingerprints. MD5 checksums for linux distros are commonplace, and simple. In addition, there less CPU time required to verify a single MD5 checksum per image than to verify that image against millions of signatures.
No racks filled with boxes labeled "Carnivore," no spooks in button-down shirts dashing about, no nothing. Could just as well be a closet, albeit one that requires heavy-duty ramp access on one door. Massive, cast iron, diesel-powered brooms, I'll bet.
I've got to say here that I agree with your sentiments about Islam and Muslims. While I have nothing against these people personally, I don't like their religion and the societies it creates. It IS oppressive. I would have to think you refer to the forms of fundamentalist Islam that receive such widespread attention these days, and that it is unfair to generalize from that to Islam as a whole. You statement seems akin to saying "I hate Christians because they burn alive people whom they suspect as witches."
Why you chain up your $500Million lawn ornament
on
3 Ton Meteorite Stolen
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Despite prevailing suspicions that a group of mutant little girls whizzed off with the rock to build their Help-the-Town-and-Make-It-a-Better-Place machine, don't forget that meteorite rock is pretty scarce, and can fetch a pretty penny/ounce.
Martian Meteorites have sold for $85k/ounce, and this source claims $3600/troy ounce for more garden variety space rocks. This is more valuable than gold, platinum, maybe comparable to Rhodium.
So, (3tonnes = 128,602.986troy ounces)*$3600/ounce = $467 Million, just sitting around in your backyard. No chain, or Kryptonite lock, or even post-it note saying "please don't steal." Just asking for trouble from the neighbor kids, they were.
"Under the new rules... will only be able to use the data for national security purposes and not to fight ordinary crime..." Until, of course, they change the rules again. Once the nascent terrorist menace of jaywalking, running stoplights, public urination, and petty drug deals is fully acknowledged by your gov't, then yes, those cameras will indeed be used exclusively for national security purposes.
Local STL news coverage seems kinda frosty: St. Louis Post-Dispatch...from which you glean that the ACLU is an "activist group," which is probably fair, but interesting how they're called such first, instead of simply saying ACLU in title or even the 1st sentence like the Associated Press did.
And the obligatory non-response from the local PD...
"The St. Louis Police Department has had little to say about the ACLU's plan. [Chief] Mokwa has said the taping would be legal and that he believed it would capture scenes of officers acting professionally. When asked for Mokwa's thoughts on Wednesday, a police spokeswoman sent an e-mail that 'the chief's reaction was the same as it has been in the past.'"
Not terribly long ago, Inquirer ran a story about how the Cell processor in the PS3 suffered from a rather striking lack of local memory (e.g. cache) bandwidth. "Striking," as in the read bandwidth being something like 3 orders of magnitude slower than the corresponding write bandwidth.
I'm curious whether this problem was fixed by spinning new silicon, or whether Sony must ship their flawed boxes as-is.
The padded notebook messenger bags from Timbuk 2 I've found to be great. Mine has outlasted *ANY* backpack or messenger bag I've owned in past, including ones not intended for laptops. Drawback: they're $100, tho you can specify the colors.
I agree with the frustration of the poster of this article. It's frequently even worse with Unix-under-Windows environments like Cygwin, Hummingbird, where you have to deal with both cut & paste schemes and the data transport between 2 clipboards. I don't favor one scheme over the other; it's just that dealing with both simulatenously is very awkward.
A simple, high-level, question: why can't the Window Manager (Gnome, KDE, etc.) be made to handle both schemes, and allow the user to switch between them, but not let both scheme be active at once? This would of couse require support in the applications running under the WM's, but I would figure such a change in inevitable if the Linux desktop is to become more mainstream.
Slashdot Mirror
Drupal, as would most any other PHP app like Joomla or Wordpress, works fine under lighttp and nginx. The effort goes intro translating whatever apache-centric config for the tool into lighttp or nginx config, and this effort would be required regardless of whether you use Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, etc.
Indeed, I run a Drupal portal under nginx + fastcgi-php + sqlite to get fast page loads.
There is a excellent calendar module right here, which leverages heavily off of functionality provided by other modules (as is Drupal convention). From a standpoint of functionality, available features, and extendability, it's better than anything I found with Joomla.
http://drupal.org/project/calendar
Here's a screencast tutorial:
http://www.drupaltherapy.com/node/76
I've used this module extensively, out-of-the-box most of the time, and yes, I do so as a paid consultant from time to time.
Besides that, since Drupal tries to provide a framework for anyone and everyone to contribute pieces via 3rd-party modules, it will be as chaotic, diverse, and even inscrutable as one would expect a bazaar to be. Still, it enables that bazaar to exist in the first place.
As in, "You customers will buy our products because we say so, and just because. Don't bother asking why; it's too complicated for you to understand."
You do have to admire the simplicity of their business model.
I'm amazed that data centers have yet to acknowledged (as regulated) as heavy industry, what with their power consumption, size, and even pollution via hot air expelled from massive cooling plants. It was rarely surprising when GM, Ford and Chrysler would relocate their plants to capitalize on laxer environmental regulation, cheaper labor, or lower taxes. Somehow it's surprising when Microsoft feels similar motivations to move its massive plants?
If simply rolling along a public paved surface (whether powered or not) becomes a taxable event, then why limit it just to cars?
Despite the heroic efforts of the selfless folks in your local transportation lobby, roads, bridges, and other elements of the asphalt jungle are still really darned expensive. Each penny you can squeeze out to offset the destructive effects of every tire rotation is one less 1/1000th of a pothole, the lobby would like you to know.
Perhaps the better response is "Something that might get more Americans to ride pedal-operated aircraft." Very little lateral traversal of pavement there.
Unfortunately, this wireless service is basically subsidized by revenue from wired customers. Comcast is not expecting to meet its expected profit margins by offering this service, so the company assuages its apprehensions by binding the service to its existing customer base (who no doubt are thrilled about the opportunity to pay Comcast even more money).
Sure, you could ask insightful questions like "Gee, are Comcast's expected profit margins maybe not sustainable?" or "Don't you see the potential size of a wireless-only customer base?" However, you're likely to get a more coherent answer to these questions from a brick wall than from Comcast.
A 20km-tall inflatable structure is indeed admirable, and a realistic step in the right direction towards building real super-structures like a space elevator, a floating Buckyball, etc.
An novel approach for non-rocket launch, which may be more possible with the current state of technology than a space elevator (in that it requires less quantity of unobtanium), is a launch loop. It uses reactive centrifugal force to hold itself aloft.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop
I'm playing with mesh node wifi routers, setting up a small mesh near where I live.
Something like this would be awesome as an itty-bitty squid server, to cache users' commonly browsed web content within the mesh itself. The open question would be whether the cache itself should reside entirely on a RAM disk to keep down access times, or whether the flash disk is fast enough. I'm guessing the former.
It's sad to see a detailed point-by-point response, whether the popular option of this thread agrees with it or not, be modded down as 'troll,' The involuntary nervous system now extends to typing fingertips, as per the latest evolution?
Yahoo cached version of DroneBL announcement at http://dronebl.org/blog/8
http://74.6.239.67/search/cache?ei=UTF-8&p=http%3A%2F%2Fdronebl.org%2Fblog%2F8&fr=ubuntu&u=dronebl.org/blog/8&d=XjpWTp2uSg7q&icp=1&.intl=us
Yes, the last mile tends to be the most expensive segment of any conventional resident broadband scheme in this country, because of our infrastructure's unhealthy dependence on unsustainable, top-down approaches. Why does every wired home need a twisted pair and associated telephone pole forest when ad-hoc wireless schemes like mesh node wifi could suffice for perhaps 80-90% of people affected?
Federally subsidized DSL, should it ever come about, would indeed increase broadband access in direly underserved markets like the inner cities and rural communities. But it would be expensive (we'd just be using taxpayer $$$ to further build out the top-down systems described above), it would most certainly not be competitive or innovative, and the actual details of its implementation would still be left to the very same telco monopolies we gripe about now.
Wireless technologies like mesh node wifi, WiMax, possibly even White Space, whenever that appears, could readily serve urban and suburban markets. We already use churches, post offices, school, etc as neighborhood polling places, why not also as uplinks for the local wireless broadband presence? It also need not be gov't mediated. Imagine running these wireless presences as neighborhood co-ops, similar to the century-old tradition of agricultural co-ops, or even wireless kibbutzes.
And for rural communities, why not approaches like the Tribal Digital Village?
http://www.sctdv.net/
http://mediaresearchhub.ssrc.org/southern-california-tribal-digital-village/institution_view
http://pactlab-dev.spcomm.uiuc.edu/home/archives/visualizations/tribal_digital_village_antenna_tower.html
http://www.flickr.com/photos/communitytechnology/sets/72157594313899663/
This is a local community wireless network serving a tribal community in the mountains of Southern California, using community wifi technology and high-speed backhauls to the uplink on the coast.
Lest we steer ourselves into a another precarious situation like the current one with fossil fuels, perhaps it would be good to look at the issues with acquiring necessary raw materials, should the current domestic battery market expand by an order of magnitude.
Assuming many of the batteries manufactured still require cobalt, then increasing the demand of that material by 10x would almost certainly place peculiar political demands on the country that provides most of the world's cobalt: the Congo. To paraphrase a commenter on the original article, will we end up "bringing democracy" to the Congo as we just did in Iraq?
What about cadmium? NiCd Batteries already represent the majority of the world's use of cadmium. It's a by-product of zinc manufacturing, and poisonous in high concentration. Following a trend already everpresent the local auto industry, more manufactured cadmium comes from our neighbors to the North and South than from us, even tho we have the largest market of the 3 countries. To what extent would existing environmental problems with cadmium manufacture be exacerbated by the damand increasing 10x?
Finally there is nickel. The company that provides 20% of the world's supply, Norilsk Nickel, also happens to reside in one of the world's most polluted areas. How would both the local environmental damage, AND the US's relationship with Russia, be altered by a 10x increase our demand for nickel?
I read on Ars Technica that Google, Dell, Intel, and Microsoft submitted a proof-of-concept prototype to the FCC for testing. Now that this (de)regulation has been approved, any thoughts on who will be the first to roll out White Space devices.
It takes *very little* current to short a FET gate, i.e. microamps or less. Indeed, compare the geometry of these whiskers to the tracks etched on silicon. Not every bit of metal exposed on a PCB will carry current large enough to fuse these whiskers before they cause disruption. Furthermore, chip-scale assembly techniques likes BGA will give you plenty of areas with large blobs of solder within convenient whisker distance of each other.
As referenced in another comment, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center does indeed seem pretty concerned:
http://nepp.nasa.gov/WHISKER/
This article is almost certainly a hoax. The thrust available from pressurized propellant is in no way adequate for any body to even approach escape velocity. The article mentions the inventor's ongoing refinements to the bottle's capacity and structural integrity (elongation, kevlar, carbon fiber), along with the bit about using multiple stages. However, all these things amount to adding weight to the missile, which means more propellant at higher pressure (= more weight), which mean more structural enhancements (= even more weight). The inventor will not be able to achieve necessary thrust vs. weight ratio to attain any kind of significant altitude.
There is a very simple reason why rocketry traditionally uses combustible propellants: the combustion creates superheated gases at pressures far exceeding the pressure at which the propellant is stored in the onboard tanks, effectively converting chemical energy into massive amounts of thrust. This pop bottle rocket does not enjoy the same energy conversion process.
If the inventor could devise a way to store superheated plasma (i.e. hotter than core of the sun) in a small, low-weight package that requires little to no containment energy, then yes, perhaps it could escape the atmosphere, but he'd need something much more elaborate than a bike pump to the charge it up.
There is the common practice of scanning a filesystem (whether on CD or not) for virus signatures via whatever anti-virus app suits your fancy, but this is an inherently reactionary approach. You can only scan for the virii you're aware of. Why not compute MD5 checkums or something similar over the CD image? Seems like that would be much simpler and more elegant than routinely checking your images against an ever expanding (and always incomplete) list of virii fingerprints. MD5 checksums for linux distros are commonplace, and simple. In addition, there less CPU time required to verify a single MD5 checksum per image than to verify that image against millions of signatures.
Only 2 pictures, and both depict only closed doors leading to Mark Klein's secret room, # 641A.
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/multimedia/2006/05/70944
No racks filled with boxes labeled "Carnivore," no spooks in button-down shirts dashing about, no nothing. Could just as well be a closet, albeit one that requires heavy-duty ramp access on one door. Massive, cast iron, diesel-powered brooms, I'll bet.
Despite prevailing suspicions that a group of mutant little girls whizzed off with the rock to build their Help-the-Town-and-Make-It-a-Better-Place machine, don't forget that meteorite rock is pretty scarce, and can fetch a pretty penny/ounce.
Martian Meteorites have sold for $85k/ounce, and this source claims $3600/troy ounce for more garden variety space rocks. This is more valuable than gold, platinum, maybe comparable to Rhodium.
So, (3tonnes = 128,602.986troy ounces)*$3600/ounce = $467 Million, just sitting around in your backyard. No chain, or Kryptonite lock, or even post-it note saying "please don't steal." Just asking for trouble from the neighbor kids, they were.
Local STL news coverage seems kinda frosty: ...from which you glean that the ACLU is an "activist group," which is probably fair, but interesting how they're called such first, instead of simply saying ACLU in title or even the 1st sentence like the Associated Press did.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
And the obligatory non-response from the local PD...
"The St. Louis Police Department has had little to say about the ACLU's plan. [Chief] Mokwa has said the taping would be legal and that he believed it would capture scenes of officers acting professionally. When asked for Mokwa's thoughts on Wednesday, a police spokeswoman sent an e-mail that 'the chief's reaction was the same as it has been in the past.'"
Not terribly long ago, Inquirer ran a story about how the Cell processor in the PS3 suffered from a rather striking lack of local memory (e.g. cache) bandwidth. "Striking," as in the read bandwidth being something like 3 orders of magnitude slower than the corresponding write bandwidth. I'm curious whether this problem was fixed by spinning new silicon, or whether Sony must ship their flawed boxes as-is.
Timbuk 2 page
Plus, they hold about nine 16oz beer bottles just as comfortably. ;)
http://www.cadsoft.de
A simple, high-level, question: why can't the Window Manager (Gnome, KDE, etc.) be made to handle both schemes, and allow the user to switch between them, but not let both scheme be active at once? This would of couse require support in the applications running under the WM's, but I would figure such a change in inevitable if the Linux desktop is to become more mainstream.