Hmmm maybe I should have included that as a reason for healthy en masse uptake as opposed to a personal reason for using it. Seriously though their combined message/artwork/general packaging is very well done. Everything they release is coordinated by color, photographs, logo, typeface, etc - from their gnome theme to their website to the free CDs you can request. The importance they place on appearance is underlined by the fact that they maintain a 20 person art team
Mary's genes. I (and Im sure Im not alone here) use ubuntu primarily because it's essentially Debian.
Ubuntu should just rename itself to debain-desktop, and not just for the 'under the hood' reasons. A base debian system is just that - a very basic linux install (plus SSH); Ubuntu has done a damn good job of doing the same thing in desktop form. Office apps, gaim, not much more. My mother could probably figure out how to do basic email/internet/word processing with ubuntu without much coaching. Just compare the program menus on ubuntu with those of say, knoppix and you'll know what I mean.
Besides the good base app choices there's solid driver support, ease of install, damn good UI, and great marketting. Only thing I would change is out-of-the-box in-browser media support (vlc-plugin or mplayer-plugin that works).
1. Holy shit. wow. The above list just goes to show how much work can be involved in maintaing a tool which im sure many administrators take for granted and assume is more or less static.
2. This is exactly the kind of summary each project needs. A list of developers and features (or at least a link to the relevant changelogs) and the version number (or future version number) we can see those changes in.
Amen. I've had a problem with this since they announced it - such a great idea but no content on their site re: the actual work. They should have paid someone $4500 to maintain their summer of code page!
Cisco devices, both IOS and CatOS based, use the 'summertime' command to compensate for daylight saving time (example). This means that a change in the DST setup would force you to upgrade code. For organizations with thousands of devices, this is less than easy.
Why upgrade to avoid an annoyance you ask? Because it's way more than an annoyance. Many cisco installations use kerberos to authenticate user logins (not just for management sessions, some RAS as well). Kerberos uses synchronized timestamps as a pre-qualifier for authentication, allowing for a clock drift of five minutes before denial. Without an IOS/CatOS upgrade The offset caused by this change would lock any and all Cisco administrators out of their network devices until someone could either remotely disable AAA via SNMP or worst case, locally knock the device off of the network to force a password-fallback (if thats not denied out of paranoia already).
Won't someone please think of the network engineers?
Ummm no. I recently moved away from the nuke set (phpnuke too closed-developmkent, postnuke to full of security holes). I chose mambo because of it's popularity and ease of setup. It's been a nightmare since then. Mambo is unorganized as HELL. The documentation is horrible and the administration panel is a GUI junkyard.
Want to make your own theme? Good luck. There's like 9 user-definable php insertion points and if you remove one of them your modules go with it. It's not intelligent enough to move to the next defined placeholder (both nukes are).
It's very powerful after a few months of acclamating yourself, but the learning curve is far too great. Postnuke on the other hand was a single-day affair for me.
Just my 2 cents. Oh and dont follow the link in my sig, it's the wasteland that was a failed attempt at customizing mambo:).
If the contractor's math is correct, the amortization period (when our power bill savings equals the installation cost) is about 12 years.
What's the lifetime on solar panels? I would imagine there's some sort of capacitance/battery involved - in which case won't you have to replace those on a regular basis?/me r not a solar guy - just genuinely want to know
I would love to see a real-time picture of my 'net connections as my desktop picture, allowing me to change my 'net habits based on what I see.
Try Carnivore. It's a simple sniffer that acts as a backend to any visualizer you can write (in a number of supported languages). There's a nice online library of those frontends on their site as well. The only downside is that currently there's no linux version:(.
I listened to a few hours of the stockholder briefing. Some guy in the audience actually had the gaul to ask if he could use his Yahoo Mail with this new service. Bryn deferred to the PR chick who announced this - SHE SAID YES. As in 'yes we're in talks with other vendors to get 'hooks' to display their mail services'.
Bottom line? Google's got balls. They repeatedly stressed that they dont track user statistics by services crossover or hits per person, but by user utility. The fact that they would allow and even per-emptively OFFER access to offsite mail shows that they're not just pulling our legs about that mantra . ..
RTFA. It explicitly states that power companies cannot become backbone providers because long-haul data gets killed by interference from transformers/repeaters. They can still drop leased lines to substations and last-mile it from there, but this in turn feeds those very same backbone providers the utilities seek to compete with . ..
Speaking of which - why arent the power companies themselves pushing for more active enforcement of the telecommunications act of 1996 regarding this issue? This seems like a perfect place to call it out - lines sold to utilities at forced wholesale prices could A) make them some money, B) hurt the telcos and C) make consumers happy.
Bahhh ya beat me to it. My vote goes for request tracker. We replaced Remedy (read: $15,000/yr in support costs) with RT (read: free with a good geek) and have had relatively few issues.
It seems like a huge waste to throw out a 120 gig drive with the mechanical bits in good working order.
It is a waste. the vast majority drives die when their platters or head goes - very few actually lose a logic board. As such, there are LOTS of dead drives with good logic boards floating around. Just fleabay/Craigslist for your drive model along with the word 'parts' or 'repair'. Pick up a drive with bad surfaces and cannibalize the still-good logicboard . . . Win/Win.
Actually - it is about circumventing copy control.
He's looking to 'decrypt' what is probably encrypted audio or an encrypted filesystem entirely. Skylarov merely 'decrypted' ROT13 and was thrown in prison for it. Im sure the fuggin POLICE and/or their sneaky-ass surveillance contractor OEM would have no problem doing the same to someone who broke their tap's encryption and posted directions on how to do it. I dont't agree with the DMCA on this (if it's yours - you should be able to do anything you want with it), but this is a textbook example of an offense prosecutable under the DMCA.
So you're concerned about letting things go on auto-pilot and missing an alarm . ..
Why not slap a modem into the head nagios box and have it page you when things fail. Don't worry about having to wear a beeper - you can page most cellphones via your carrier's SMS gateway (still dial-capable).
Ahhhh you're right - in that case it wouldn't work. I guess you're going to have to go with USB:(. If you're using an older laptop motherboard I don't think you're problem is going to be the video interface though, It will probably be the video processing.
What is the telerobot going to use the video for? Is it simply an interface to the remote controller (human or non-human) of the robot? If so you should think about using simple wireless video. 2.4Ghz wireless video is plentiful and cheap, even on battery (read: X10). On the remote end you can feed it into an analog screen or another, beefier machine with TV-in. If the video is going to be processed and acted upon BY the robot without remote assistance, you may want to look into getting stronger equipment onboard the robot or moving up to an ATX form factor power by battery.
So come on give us some more details! We promise we won't steal your thesis idea:)!
Take an old BTTV-chipset based TV in card with composite in (wintvgo comes to mind - ebay or craigslist it) and hook it up to a real camera.
While the two of these may seem pricy - the truth is the card is cheap and non-USB cameras are abundant and cheap because you dont HAVE to get a camera 'designed' to work with your pc and therefore price-inflated. You can use an old camcorder or even a security camera. Either can be found around for alot less than you think. Additionally, The image quality on these real CCD based cameras far exceeds that of most USB devices and the PCI card means you get close to 800 lines of horizontal resolution in at very little processor cost.
I do the same thing here and it cost me $25 (had the pci card, bought an old videoconferencing camera on ebay).
Blocking is easy enough nowadays, but switching images is far more fun. I had this image in my gallery, from when a bus at my university crashed into a dorm. Before a recent football game, a fan from Uconn found this image and used it in a 'we're gonna kick your ass'-type post on their athletics message board. So I saw this in my logs and removed/changed the image to this one. The post was then filled with 'wtf' comments and was pulled a day later:).
I was about to say the same thing - although AFAIK we're missing one of the points hes looking for:
stability - Check security - Check rapid updates - Check ease of administration - Check high-level support options - No check
I don't consider google and usenet high level support options. Im sure someone knows of a commercial outfit that will do pay-for-play deb support - so please, chime in . ..
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm maybe I should have included that as a reason for healthy en masse uptake as opposed to a personal reason for using it. Seriously though their combined message/artwork/general packaging is very well done. Everything they release is coordinated by color, photographs, logo, typeface, etc - from their gnome theme to their website to the free CDs you can request. The importance they place on appearance is underlined by the fact that they maintain a 20 person art team
What is it about Mary?
Mary's genes. I (and Im sure Im not alone here) use ubuntu primarily because it's essentially Debian.
Ubuntu should just rename itself to debain-desktop, and not just for the 'under the hood' reasons. A base debian system is just that - a very basic linux install (plus SSH); Ubuntu has done a damn good job of doing the same thing in desktop form. Office apps, gaim, not much more. My mother could probably figure out how to do basic email/internet/word processing with ubuntu without much coaching. Just compare the program menus on ubuntu with those of say, knoppix and you'll know what I mean.
Besides the good base app choices there's solid driver support, ease of install, damn good UI, and great marketting. Only thing I would change is out-of-the-box in-browser media support (vlc-plugin or mplayer-plugin that works).
I made up a quick-n-dirty keyhole file of the place:
o t-09-16-05.kmz
http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~jgaynor/random/slashd
For the paranoid, feel free to save it and then open it up from within Google Earth. For the rest of us just launch it directly.
Two points here -
1. Holy shit. wow. The above list just goes to show how much work can be involved in maintaing a tool which im sure many administrators take for granted and assume is more or less static.
2. This is exactly the kind of summary each project needs. A list of developers and features (or at least a link to the relevant changelogs) and the version number (or future version number) we can see those changes in.
Amen. I've had a problem with this since they announced it - such a great idea but no content on their site re: the actual work. They should have paid someone $4500 to maintain their summer of code page!
"is better to work on creating something done right, or to object to it on moral grounds?"
Open-source developer support or not, I don't think it matters.
-He's using that big open relay in the sky now . . .
.
-In New Jersey, killing a spamlord is only a class B misedemeanor . .
-Whatta you call a spammer with a crushed skull lying in a pool of his own blood?
A good start!
Seriously though that's pretty f*cked up. Spammer or not, no one deserves that.
This is not a trivial issue. Observe . . .
Cisco devices, both IOS and CatOS based, use the 'summertime' command to compensate for daylight saving time (example). This means that a change in the DST setup would force you to upgrade code. For organizations with thousands of devices, this is less than easy.
Why upgrade to avoid an annoyance you ask? Because it's way more than an annoyance. Many cisco installations use kerberos to authenticate user logins (not just for management sessions, some RAS as well). Kerberos uses synchronized timestamps as a pre-qualifier for authentication, allowing for a clock drift of five minutes before denial. Without an IOS/CatOS upgrade The offset caused by this change would lock any and all Cisco administrators out of their network devices until someone could either remotely disable AAA via SNMP or worst case, locally knock the device off of the network to force a password-fallback (if thats not denied out of paranoia already).
Won't someone please think of the network engineers?
Ummm no. I recently moved away from the nuke set (phpnuke too closed-developmkent, postnuke to full of security holes). I chose mambo because of it's popularity and ease of setup. It's been a nightmare since then. Mambo is unorganized as HELL. The documentation is horrible and the administration panel is a GUI junkyard.
:).
Want to make your own theme? Good luck. There's like 9 user-definable php insertion points and if you remove one of them your modules go with it. It's not intelligent enough to move to the next defined placeholder (both nukes are).
It's very powerful after a few months of acclamating yourself, but the learning curve is far too great. Postnuke on the other hand was a single-day affair for me.
Just my 2 cents. Oh and dont follow the link in my sig, it's the wasteland that was a failed attempt at customizing mambo
If the contractor's math is correct, the amortization period (when our power bill savings equals the installation cost) is about 12 years.
/me r not a solar guy - just genuinely want to know
What's the lifetime on solar panels? I would imagine there's some sort of capacitance/battery involved - in which case won't you have to replace those on a regular basis?
After reading this 'report' I was mysteriously sideswiped by a giant grain of salt being piloted by lobbyists and smear-for-hire researchers.
I would love to see a real-time picture of my 'net connections as my desktop picture, allowing me to change my 'net habits based on what I see.
:(.
Try Carnivore. It's a simple sniffer that acts as a backend to any visualizer you can write (in a number of supported languages). There's a nice online library of those frontends on their site as well. The only downside is that currently there's no linux version
I listened to a few hours of the stockholder briefing. Some guy in the audience actually had the gaul to ask if he could use his Yahoo Mail with this new service. Bryn deferred to the PR chick who announced this - SHE SAID YES. As in 'yes we're in talks with other vendors to get 'hooks' to display their mail services'.
.
Bottom line? Google's got balls. They repeatedly stressed that they dont track user statistics by services crossover or hits per person, but by user utility. The fact that they would allow and even per-emptively OFFER access to offsite mail shows that they're not just pulling our legs about that mantra . .
RTFA. It explicitly states that power companies cannot become backbone providers because long-haul data gets killed by interference from transformers/repeaters. They can still drop leased lines to substations and last-mile it from there, but this in turn feeds those very same backbone providers the utilities seek to compete with . . .
Speaking of which - why arent the power companies themselves pushing for more active enforcement of the telecommunications act of 1996 regarding this issue? This seems like a perfect place to call it out - lines sold to utilities at forced wholesale prices could A) make them some money, B) hurt the telcos and C) make consumers happy.
Bahhh ya beat me to it. My vote goes for request tracker. We replaced Remedy (read: $15,000/yr in support costs) with RT (read: free with a good geek) and have had relatively few issues.
It seems like a huge waste to throw out a 120 gig drive with the mechanical bits in good working order.
It is a waste. the vast majority drives die when their platters or head goes - very few actually lose a logic board. As such, there are LOTS of dead drives with good logic boards floating around. Just fleabay/Craigslist for your drive model along with the word 'parts' or 'repair'. Pick up a drive with bad surfaces and cannibalize the still-good logicboard . . . Win/Win.
*disclaimer: I realize I may be feeding a troll
Actually - it is about circumventing copy control.
He's looking to 'decrypt' what is probably encrypted audio or an encrypted filesystem entirely. Skylarov merely 'decrypted' ROT13 and was thrown in prison for it. Im sure the fuggin POLICE and/or their sneaky-ass surveillance contractor OEM would have no problem doing the same to someone who broke their tap's encryption and posted directions on how to do it. I dont't agree with the DMCA on this (if it's yours - you should be able to do anything you want with it), but this is a textbook example of an offense prosecutable under the DMCA.
Good for you man! Just be thankful you're not in the US or your attempt to reverse-engineer the audio encryption could land you in prison.
The title pretty much says it all - even if the above link works you're going to spend the next 4 hours downloading a shiny new drink coaster.
So you're concerned about letting things go on auto-pilot and missing an alarm . . .
:). Either way, nagios has ASSLOADS of event notification options.
Why not slap a modem into the head nagios box and have it page you when things fail. Don't worry about having to wear a beeper - you can page most cellphones via your carrier's SMS gateway (still dial-capable).
Too much hassle? How about AIM? YIM? Jabber? Email?
If you're TRULY the teeth jittering, chain smoking NOC type, buy some x10 crap and build a physical network alarm interface like I did
Ahhhh you're right - in that case it wouldn't work. I guess you're going to have to go with USB :(. If you're using an older laptop motherboard I don't think you're problem is going to be the video interface though, It will probably be the video processing.
:)!
What is the telerobot going to use the video for? Is it simply an interface to the remote controller (human or non-human) of the robot? If so you should think about using simple wireless video. 2.4Ghz wireless video is plentiful and cheap, even on battery (read: X10). On the remote end you can feed it into an analog screen or another, beefier machine with TV-in. If the video is going to be processed and acted upon BY the robot without remote assistance, you may want to look into getting stronger equipment onboard the robot or moving up to an ATX form factor power by battery.
So come on give us some more details! We promise we won't steal your thesis idea
Take an old BTTV-chipset based TV in card with composite in (wintvgo comes to mind - ebay or craigslist it) and hook it up to a real camera.
While the two of these may seem pricy - the truth is the card is cheap and non-USB cameras are abundant and cheap because you dont HAVE to get a camera 'designed' to work with your pc and therefore price-inflated. You can use an old camcorder or even a security camera. Either can be found around for alot less than you think. Additionally, The image quality on these real CCD based cameras far exceeds that of most USB devices and the PCI card means you get close to 800 lines of horizontal resolution in at very little processor cost.
I do the same thing here and it cost me $25 (had the pci card, bought an old videoconferencing camera on ebay).
Blocking is easy enough nowadays, but switching images is far more fun. I had this image in my gallery, from when a bus at my university crashed into a dorm. Before a recent football game, a fan from Uconn found this image and used it in a 'we're gonna kick your ass'-type post on their athletics message board. So I saw this in my logs and removed/changed the image to this one. The post was then filled with 'wtf' comments and was pulled a day later :).
Shouldn't this be filed under 'funny'?
I was about to say the same thing - although AFAIK we're missing one of the points hes looking for:
.
stability - Check
security - Check
rapid updates - Check
ease of administration - Check
high-level support options - No check
I don't consider google and usenet high level support options. Im sure someone knows of a commercial outfit that will do pay-for-play deb support - so please, chime in . .
Otherwise go debian!