How is this more than a zip-code structured Orkut community system? Besides pre-defining the communities before any participants arrive, it's really not.
How CAN you improve on the orkut-style social networking system?
1. Dont be so DAMN slow. Friendster, orkut, etc are all so slow at this point it's almost worthless. They all start off fast but load kills them.
2. Create an easy 'port' system whereby you can just 'point' the new site at an existing profile to have the new profile auto-created and friends added automatically. Filling out 4 page profiles and spamming your friends multiple times a year = no fun.
Housecall is a web-based virus scanner that, since it is loaded anew every time, always has the latest virus definitions. Since it installs nothing but temporary cache files, you dont have to worry about it slowing down your machine.
Because of the nature of the application it can't always clean the offending virii/malware, but it will at least alert you to their presence and give you their names so that you can manually remove them. When combined with stinger, spybot and google it's an excellent choice for on-site calls to machines without AV or for your old boxen that just cant afford the extra cycles for full-time AV bloat.
If you prefer to do the offline thing, try the Knoppix anti-virus distribution (weak link I know). Once again it isn't a permanently installed application and since the OS isn't running it can slap down bugs before they're loaded into memory.
I don't think there's anything especially unusual about those VA boxes, apart from blue LED's
Ehh they're fairly proprietary once you open the case. Here's what Ive found - I've only looked into their 2u and smaller cases so larger ones may be more brown-bag:
-Case specific power supplies in some models (cant replace) -Model specific PCI risers -Short ATX mobo header cables (wont reach some boards) -Proprietary power/reset/LED headers (unusable unless cut and spliced - good luck tracing through multi-layered PCB)
With a little work though they do make kick-ass cases and can usually be had on the cheap since no one wants to waste time modding them.
I had a similar problem with a set of ebay-ed VALinux chassis . ..
I purchased a lot of 4 VALinux 2u rackmount chassis from ebay a few months ago for a good price (model "FullON 2130"). I knew they weren't going to be 'standard' atx but figured I could rewire things from documentation to get the power button and LEDs working. No dice. There is no documentation left at all. So im taking it upon myself to document/diagram what I did to make the power/reset headers ATX-usable and will post a procedure on my humble website. Hopefully google will pick it up and I can help the next guy that comes along wanting to do the same thing . . .
Are YOU the poster? It's quite obvious since there IS no wme for OSX that a winboxen would be nescessary to do this. While the poster mentioned mac clients, I don't think the entire school would be 100% apple. As for client software you're right - everyone and their mother has the WMV codecs installed.
Just suggesting a FREE (at least as in beer) option - there's no reason to let your zealotry blind you. I used macs until I was 18 and since then have worked with just about everything else under the sun. If there is only one truth - it's that there is no one platform worth flaming over:).
I know I'm opening myself up to criticism here, but since a tech guy isn't going to be running the show, windows media encoder may be the way to go. You can create a 'stream settings' file, drop it on their desktop and they can begin streaming by simply opening it. It's free, streams all kinds of video and can even do complex stuff like shuffling through a power point presentation - which sounds kind of what you'd like to do. It handles my little fishcam without problems:).
haha no - only the lateral shifting of the slashdot effect to your local lan as some dope sets up a cache server in your office. Im sure the./ colo guys at exodus would love for you to run one:).
The now End-Of-Life apple Emate would be PERFECT for what youre talking about. It was basically an Apple newton in a small laptop form factor. If I remember correctly Apple marketted them to schoolkids for this exact purpose. Here's a nice synopsis at everymac.
It can at least sync back to a mac, getting it to sync back to a PC shouldnt be a problem. They're SUPER cheap on ebay.
sangoma has made t1/e1 cards for some time now with drivers for *bsd and linux. they have just been recently merged into openbsd-current and will get maintained by the openbsd peeps there.
between carp, pf, pfsync, the soon-to-be-a-reality ifstated, and now the sangoma drivers, the question becomes more, why cisco?
Because we're talking about routing today, not routing in 1998. T1 speed traffic can probably be routed without loss by an apple newton that's simultaneously trying to OCR a hand-written journal entry by Christopher Reeve. Throw in virulent windows boxes at full-duplex GigE speeds and you're going to need ASICs for the policy and routing decisions.
If your traffic was nothing but orderly, GIANT flows of data that went one for minutes at a time then maybe you could get some use out of that bus. Traditional traffic will squash the processor before the bus even gets up to a jogging pace. Giant backplanes or busses are very good for non-policy work (read: switching) but won't help when individual attention must be paid to each packet or frame.
Its the policy involved with routing that will squash a PC-based router. Each packet has to be checked against ACLs, Quality of Service policies, line subscription rates, etc, etc. Big iron handles this by flow switching, IE applying policy to the first packet in each flow and then switching the rest based on that initial policy decision. There simply is no PC equivalent without specialized hardware.
Even then, flow switching fails when viral traffic or network scans are thrown into the mix. Millions of ip threads per second, all with different destinations addresses and ports will bring even the hardiest of PCs to it's knees.
didn't they get quite mad at some guys cloning their hardware
The incident you're referring to is the frankenpix project. It used the fact that one of the original PIX product line was a 300Mhz PII on an intel OEM chipset to create a clone using commodity parts combined with a PCI flash card (the only expensive part). Cisco took a cue from this, however, and changed it's business model accordingly. Newer pixes now come in the form of non-X86 standalone boxes or blades that interface directly with the switch-fabric of their higher end chassis (how the hell do you write chassis plural?).
The comment above about PIX licensing is also correct. The base PIXos is still downloadable from Cisco's software repository for free with a valid CCO login, but add-on features are activated via 'product keys' which are a bit harder to come by.
In my experience, Cisco can meet basically any NEED you have. A good sales engineer can fulfill almost any scenario and guarantee that it will work. The biggest downside with Cisco is, undeniably, price.
Matching the featureset of a cisco installation with zebra? easy.
Matching the performance of a cisco box with Linux and Zebra? uh-uh. Not gonna happen. For a small installations maybe, but not when performance or load is involved.
Why? Cisco does everything in hardware (ASICS). You can't meet performance like that with a PCI nic and the various bottlenecks associated with standard PC-based architecture. Juniper realized this and made a business model out of it. The took some open-source OS (which I can't remember right now - BSD?) and added support for network-task specific hardware. They can match cisco on performance and load-capability if not on product line. And they do it for ALOT less. My suggestion - take a look at juniper, then throw the juni quote back in your Cisco reps face. See if you can get him to bend a little:).
Congratulations America - Antitrust law is now as worthless as the paper it's printed on!
A provision of the original terms of the AOL/Time Warner merger was the AOL would have to open it's AIM protocol before it implemented voice/video services:
In a January 11, 2001 statement by FCC Chairman William E. Kennard, upon AOL's merger with Time Warner, the FCC noted that "We require AOL to interoperate with competing instant messaging (IM) providers before it can offer videoconferencing and other streaming video over IM. This condition guards against AOL's ability to leverage its existing dominance in current IM into the broadband IM marketplace."
The FCC never followed through on this - and now AOL is officially offering voice/video and charging for it to boot. So go ahead enormous corporations! Merge to your hearts content! Merge up and down the supply chain, across competitors, whatever you want - Its all good! We'll slap provisions on you to pretend we're protecting the marketplace but won't enforce them!
Remember last week's column on abolishing the FCC? Maybe it deserves a second look at this point . . .
You're absolutely right - and yes B1/B12 are helpful when you're in the 'regrowth' stage of a squished nerve. Most people recover without issue, but some experience 'weak' nerves afterwards or even crossed nerves (ie when you smile on one side you inadvertently blink an eye). The condition has a name - something like sink***sis - but since I can't remember exactly google isn't being very helpful.
The harvard neurological forums are a great resource for people with bells/Ramsey Hunt and some other nerve disorders. They were helpful in diagnosing my weird-ass condition and finding information on how to treat it/help with the LONG (6 month) nerve regrowth.
Actually Im a big dork and sustained a fairly dork-related injury which this could help. During finals of my senior year I stressed myself out so badly that I incurred the wrath of Ramsey-Hunt syndrome - think of it like chicken pox in your brain. It cuts off the cranial facial nerve and paralyzes one side of your face. The nerve regrows but is almost never 100% again. Id love to get this fixed so my smile won't be so f*ed up anymore. I only hope when this technology hits the open market it's not tens of thousands of dollars and will work on non-spinal nerves.
Slashdot Mirror
How is this more than a zip-code structured Orkut community system? Besides pre-defining the communities before any participants arrive, it's really not.
How CAN you improve on the orkut-style social networking system?
1. Dont be so DAMN slow. Friendster, orkut, etc are all so slow at this point it's almost worthless. They all start off fast but load kills them.
2. Create an easy 'port' system whereby you can just 'point' the new site at an existing profile to have the new profile auto-created and friends added automatically. Filling out 4 page profiles and spamming your friends multiple times a year = no fun.
Bah. Im suprised no one has mentioned housecall yet:
http://housecall.antivirus.com
Housecall is a web-based virus scanner that, since it is loaded anew every time, always has the latest virus definitions. Since it installs nothing but temporary cache files, you dont have to worry about it slowing down your machine.
Because of the nature of the application it can't always clean the offending virii/malware, but it will at least alert you to their presence and give you their names so that you can manually remove them. When combined with stinger, spybot and google it's an excellent choice for on-site calls to machines without AV or for your old boxen that just cant afford the extra cycles for full-time AV bloat.
If you prefer to do the offline thing, try the Knoppix anti-virus distribution (weak link I know). Once again it isn't a permanently installed application and since the OS isn't running it can slap down bugs before they're loaded into memory.
Cheers!
I don't think there's anything especially unusual about those VA boxes, apart from blue LED's
Ehh they're fairly proprietary once you open the case. Here's what Ive found - I've only looked into their 2u and smaller cases so larger ones may be more brown-bag:
-Case specific power supplies in some models (cant replace)
-Model specific PCI risers
-Short ATX mobo header cables (wont reach some boards)
-Proprietary power/reset/LED headers (unusable unless cut and spliced - good luck tracing through multi-layered PCB)
With a little work though they do make kick-ass cases and can usually be had on the cheap since no one wants to waste time modding them.
I had a similar problem with a set of ebay-ed VALinux chassis . . .
I purchased a lot of 4 VALinux 2u rackmount chassis from ebay a few months ago for a good price (model "FullON 2130"). I knew they weren't going to be 'standard' atx but figured I could rewire things from documentation to get the power button and LEDs working. No dice. There is no documentation left at all. So im taking it upon myself to document/diagram what I did to make the power/reset headers ATX-usable and will post a procedure on my humble website. Hopefully google will pick it up and I can help the next guy that comes along wanting to do the same thing . . .
However, I do appreciate the information on WMP.
:) If the guy below had read my post maybe he wouldn't have had to troll himself. Good luck to you!
Thanks
Are YOU the poster? It's quite obvious since there IS no wme for OSX that a winboxen would be nescessary to do this. While the poster mentioned mac clients, I don't think the entire school would be 100% apple. As for client software you're right - everyone and their mother has the WMV codecs installed.
:).
Just suggesting a FREE (at least as in beer) option - there's no reason to let your zealotry blind you. I used macs until I was 18 and since then have worked with just about everything else under the sun. If there is only one truth - it's that there is no one platform worth flaming over
I know I'm opening myself up to criticism here, but since a tech guy isn't going to be running the show, windows media encoder may be the way to go. You can create a 'stream settings' file, drop it on their desktop and they can begin streaming by simply opening it. It's free, streams all kinds of video and can even do complex stuff like shuffling through a power point presentation - which sounds kind of what you'd like to do. It handles my little fishcam without problems :).
"Is this the end of the Slashdot effect?"
./ colo guys at exodus would love for you to run one :).
haha no - only the lateral shifting of the slashdot effect to your local lan as some dope sets up a cache server in your office. Im sure the
The now End-Of-Life apple Emate would be PERFECT for what youre talking about. It was basically an Apple newton in a small laptop form factor. If I remember correctly Apple marketted them to schoolkids for this exact purpose. Here's a nice synopsis at everymac.
It can at least sync back to a mac, getting it to sync back to a PC shouldnt be a problem. They're SUPER cheap on ebay.
Crazy Brits - apparently the call gophers 'ground squirrels'. Squirrels, as we all well know, communicate by singing in poorly made flash movies.
yes.
Legal threats or not, they're still in the shitter compared to more 'honorable' tech companies.
Nice to see stardock finally doing something besides inspiring bad UI design.
"the only machines we will have will either be Windows 98 or Windows 2000"
Lemme know what your ARIN range is. I'm running low on remailer zombies.
sangoma has made t1/e1 cards for some time now with drivers for *bsd and linux. they have just been recently merged into openbsd-current and will get maintained by the openbsd peeps there.
between carp, pf, pfsync, the soon-to-be-a-reality ifstated, and now the sangoma drivers, the question becomes more, why cisco?
Because we're talking about routing today, not routing in 1998. T1 speed traffic can probably be routed without loss by an apple newton that's simultaneously trying to OCR a hand-written journal entry by Christopher Reeve. Throw in virulent windows boxes at full-duplex GigE speeds and you're going to need ASICs for the policy and routing decisions.
4Gb/s Bus bandwidth != $Gb/s routing throughput.
If your traffic was nothing but orderly, GIANT flows of data that went one for minutes at a time then maybe you could get some use out of that bus. Traditional traffic will squash the processor before the bus even gets up to a jogging pace. Giant backplanes or busses are very good for non-policy work (read: switching) but won't help when individual attention must be paid to each packet or frame.
Its the policy involved with routing that will squash a PC-based router. Each packet has to be checked against ACLs, Quality of Service policies, line subscription rates, etc, etc. Big iron handles this by flow switching, IE applying policy to the first packet in each flow and then switching the rest based on that initial policy decision. There simply is no PC equivalent without specialized hardware.
Even then, flow switching fails when viral traffic or network scans are thrown into the mix. Millions of ip threads per second, all with different destinations addresses and ports will bring even the hardiest of PCs to it's knees.
didn't they get quite mad at some guys cloning their hardware
The incident you're referring to is the frankenpix project. It used the fact that one of the original PIX product line was a 300Mhz PII on an intel OEM chipset to create a clone using commodity parts combined with a PCI flash card (the only expensive part). Cisco took a cue from this, however, and changed it's business model accordingly. Newer pixes now come in the form of non-X86 standalone boxes or blades that interface directly with the switch-fabric of their higher end chassis (how the hell do you write chassis plural?).
The comment above about PIX licensing is also correct. The base PIXos is still downloadable from Cisco's software repository for free with a valid CCO login, but add-on features are activated via 'product keys' which are a bit harder to come by.
In my experience, Cisco can meet basically any NEED you have. A good sales engineer can fulfill almost any scenario and guarantee that it will work. The biggest downside with Cisco is, undeniably, price.
:).
Matching the featureset of a cisco installation with zebra? easy.
Matching the performance of a cisco box with Linux and Zebra? uh-uh. Not gonna happen. For a small installations maybe, but not when performance or load is involved.
Why? Cisco does everything in hardware (ASICS). You can't meet performance like that with a PCI nic and the various bottlenecks associated with standard PC-based architecture. Juniper realized this and made a business model out of it. The took some open-source OS (which I can't remember right now - BSD?) and added support for network-task specific hardware. They can match cisco on performance and load-capability if not on product line. And they do it for ALOT less. My suggestion - take a look at juniper, then throw the juni quote back in your Cisco reps face. See if you can get him to bend a little
Congratulations America - Antitrust law is now as worthless as the paper it's printed on!
A provision of the original terms of the AOL/Time Warner merger was the AOL would have to open it's AIM protocol before it implemented voice/video services:
In a January 11, 2001 statement by FCC Chairman William E. Kennard, upon AOL's merger with Time Warner, the FCC noted that "We require AOL to interoperate with competing instant messaging (IM) providers before it can offer videoconferencing and other streaming video over IM. This condition guards against AOL's ability to leverage its existing dominance in current IM into the broadband IM marketplace."
The FCC never followed through on this - and now AOL is officially offering voice/video and charging for it to boot. So go ahead enormous corporations! Merge to your hearts content! Merge up and down the supply chain, across competitors, whatever you want - Its all good! We'll slap provisions on you to pretend we're protecting the marketplace but won't enforce them!
Remember last week's column on abolishing the FCC? Maybe it deserves a second look at this point . . .
I know of an amazing new technology named (tentatively of course) 'headphones'. They may be the answer to your prayers - be an early adopter!
You're absolutely right - and yes B1/B12 are helpful when you're in the 'regrowth' stage of a squished nerve. Most people recover without issue, but some experience 'weak' nerves afterwards or even crossed nerves (ie when you smile on one side you inadvertently blink an eye). The condition has a name - something like sink***sis - but since I can't remember exactly google isn't being very helpful.
The harvard neurological forums are a great resource for people with bells/Ramsey Hunt and some other nerve disorders. They were helpful in diagnosing my weird-ass condition and finding information on how to treat it/help with the LONG (6 month) nerve regrowth.
...often affecting young, active people...
Actually Im a big dork and sustained a fairly dork-related injury which this could help. During finals of my senior year I stressed myself out so badly that I incurred the wrath of Ramsey-Hunt syndrome - think of it like chicken pox in your brain. It cuts off the cranial facial nerve and paralyzes one side of your face. The nerve regrows but is almost never 100% again. Id love to get this fixed so my smile won't be so f*ed up anymore. I only hope when this technology hits the open market it's not tens of thousands of dollars and will work on non-spinal nerves.
"Phew! I was worried I will not be able to use my compass."
Oh yeah! I forgot about my compass not working! Silly me - I was too busy thinking about the possible massive upsurge of CANCER . . .
And while you're at it - bring back quickies. They were like Fark, but for smart people.
From w3.org:
15.2.4 Font size: the 'font-size' and 'font-size-adjust' properties
This property describes the size of the font when set solid.
Possible values are:
[ xx-small | x-small | small | medium | large | x-large | xx-large ]