Re:So Vonage can now listen to me and my girlfrien
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VoIP Wiretapping
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· Score: 1
If there is a backdoor in VOIP, what is to stop vonage employees from listening in and recording conversations for their own shits and giggles?
Boredom.
A long time ago, when cordless phones were beginning to be popular and they all operated at 49MHz, I got a scanner.
After a while, I got sick of listening to the parks department talk about lawn mowers, and the police department talk about donuts. So I nuked that stuff, and programmed it for cordless phones.
And let me tell you that there was nothing more insipid to hear than a phone call between a boy and a girl. The rest of the calls were just as bad: Dinner at 6? You want me to bring home pizza or chicken? Yes, I'd like to drop off the kids tomorrow morning. No, it just started this shimmy-ing in the front-end, but only when... Martha, just like I said, the man at the bank says...
And that's just the purposeful calls. The vast majority of telephone calls are just mindless banter between two equally-mindless nits, with no clear objective or reason.
I listened to a few calls, for a few days, and then never got back to doing it. It wasn't fun. Nobody ever said anything interesting. I went back to playing video games, listening to music, and doing the BBS thing with my (then) copious spare time.
You're too fucking BORING to be worried about privacy.
There's all this talk here about audio cabling and listening and such, but TFA wants to know about video cabling.
It's just 75-ohm coaxial cable. It's a hand-me-down from the broadcast and defense industries.
If you were a broadcaster, you'd care about flexibility and long-term durability, and buy good professional-grade stranded-conductor RG-59 from someone like Canare, like just about all of the other broadcasters do for their temporary video interconnects. You'd then solder or (preferably) crimp your own connectors on, because then the resultant cables would both the proper length for whatever you're doing and you'd know that they were assembled correctly. Or, you'd have a company like Markertek assemble them for you.
But you're not a broadcaster. Nobody is throwing your wires across the room. Nobody is walking or driving on them. Nobody is using them to rig lights or props with.
You don't give a whit whether it's stranded or not, because it will be relocated (at most) several times a year - instead of, perhaps, several times per hour in a production studio. You do, however, care if they're assembled correctly.
And you care about having the proper length - extra cable length is hard to deal with in the typical home theater, and always reduces signal quality.
You also care about bandwidth, perhaps even more than the broadcasters do. But that's not a huge problem, as NTSC video only goes up to a few MHz.
RG-59 [1] is typically used at hundreds of MHz (think: cable TV), and is thus way more than sufficient.
So here's what you do. Buy some good, solid copper RG-59 from Lowe's, Home Depot, your local electrical contractor shop, or wherever. Look for cable that is shielded with foil and a braid, with a foam dielectric. And also buy a crimper. And some connectors. And a rotary stripper.
It's fairly self-explanatory from then on out:
Measure, cut, strip, mash, crimp. Boneheaded cable installers can do this stuff all day - any Slashdotter can tackle it without episode. Plan on wasting an end or two if you're unsure of yourself, but it really is bloody simple.
Just try to keep the three component video cables all at the same length, to keep things in sync with eachother. This isn't hyper-critical, given the real-world propagation delay of RG-59, but it's easy to keep things within an inch or so of sameness and so one might as well try.
You'll spend less on the kit than for a single set of most "Monster" cables, and likely be able to make hundreds of feet worth of custom, high-quality video interconnects with it instead of having just one set of gaudy purple wires that are all the wrong length.
And since RG-59 is so good that nobody outside of a marketing department has bothered to replace it after numerous decades, you should be good for a long, long time.
Enjoy.
[1]: Yep, I said RG-59. There's no cause to use RG-6 with baseband video signals, as there's simply insufficient bandwidth utilization and attenuation to justify the expense and added unmanagibility of RG-6. And it's easy to find reasonably decent copper RG-59, while the RG-6 typically available at retail uses a cheap copper-clad steel center conductor, which operates poorly at these frequencies (but works fine and saves money for satellite installations). And as far as anyone knew, RG-59 was sufficient for all residential video purposes until the advent of DSS, two-way cablevision, and 125-channel tuners. RG-59 is, in fact, overkill for this application. I don't care which one is bigger: RG-6 is just pissing away cash, unless you've already got some on-hand.
All that verbiage, but this substance sticks out. Verbatim, and complete, because it's good:
Do you really honestly believe that there is no room for improvement in our "Unix" way of doing things and that it will exist forever? And therefore we shouldn't try anything new? I mean.. I'm sure there were folks who swore by hand wiring their computer's logic because it gave them more control than early micro-chips. But there's a certain over-arching concept in the whole world of computing that abstraction eventually makes technology more powerful. Lets say that a new generation of admin tools actually works at some point. Suppose it actually becomes much faster, safer, and powerful to configure your Unix system from a GUI. You can accept this and say to yourself, "well.. this does actually work.. and now I have more free time to try completely new things." Or you can say, "Heck with this.. I'm doing things the old way even if they are inferior" and eventually lose your job as everyone else moves on. I'm not claiming this is just around the corner, but it will happen someday so you might as well be ready for it.
I would adore changes to the UNIX way which would help me do things faster, easier, and better.
But, I anticipate that it is impossible without much more significant effort than has been happening.
It boils down to this: None of this GUI stuff (including, for the sake of argument, clever ncurses hacks) uses any existing UNIX methodology for Getting Things Done, even though much of it is sitting right there under/bin waiting to be used.
Instead, each and every time, the overtly-creative GUI artist creates their own set of tools, and their own requisite interface with which to use them.
If the individual were to implement the flexibility of UNIX (and more; remember, it's gotta be an improvement or there's zero advantage) in their graphical configurator, then so be it - I'd jump ship immediately and start singing its praises.
But to re-implement UNIX's functionality would be a daunting task, now wouldn't it?
There is a clear divergence between traditional UNIX commands and more recent GUI modernisms. The two of them, seemingly as a rule, are anything but complementary.
This is a problem. When operating my E16/Xorg/2.6.11 desktop, I find that nothing that I tend to click on has any relationship to anything that I tend to type.
Every GUI application has its own silly user interface, with its own silly limitations. Repetitious actions abound for the simplest of activities, and my fingers (and mind) quickly grow tired of doing the same things over and over.
Meanwhile, every text-mode application has the power of UNIX behind it. Text gets munged, pipes (with and without names) shoot data between what, until a few minutes prior, were completely unrelated programs. Work Gets Done, scripted in advance, while I fetch myself some more coffee. Efficiency.
Thus, to summarize, if one wants to train the old-school away from traditional UNIX commands for daily activities, one must first make the new way at least as efficient of a system as the old way is, which will be very hard to accomplish and will involve much re-invention of hundreds of wheels.
And inventing a new scripting language is probably not-so-good, either - else, I'd have been using GimpFU for automatic image resizing instead of of the ImageMagick and shell script mumbo-jumbo that I've been relying on for all these years.
See, I don't want to learn GimpFU, even if it is better. I want to learn bash, and learn it well, ONE TIME. And then I want to proceed with getting things done, with JPEGs, and MP3s, and Postfix, a 3-gigabyte mbox,/etc, and everything else usable with a modern UNIX box.
One might gain success with their efforts if they included traditional ways with their new GUI-esque efforts. But, AFAICT, this has never been done.
It is true that one needed to fondle sendmail.cf by hand, a Long Time Ago, and that it was not a fun time.
But the only realistic scenario here is this: m4 has been around long enough that anyone not capable of using it at their location (because their sendmail was Really, Really Old) has probably already been 0wned, and been forced to upgrade or move to something different.
sendmail.cf has moved on. It is not intended for human consumption. It states as much on the very first line of the file.
For reference, see "past tense" and "present tense" in any good book on the English language.
UNIX ceases to be UNIX when it doesn't feel like UNIX anymore.
I define UNIX as a set of simple, standardized tools (awk, sed, man, cat, and friends), and a way to tie them together (the shell), along with a multitasking, multiuser enviroment, and simple configuration that can be handled from a teletype.
Webmin presents none of these things. It is therefore not UNIX. With Webmin, and its ilk, it doesn't matter that the system is all running under the Linux kernel.
The end user is never exposed to the things that make a UNIX machine a UNIX machine. It is therefore, for all purposes, not a UNIX machine. It might as well be running under Win2k3 with cygwin.dll.
I am vehemently against even the mere dilution of anything UNIX. I like the system, and I (a user, an administrator) have an easier time using it efficiently than I ever have anything else.
I am motivated in this effort by fear, but it's not at all irrational. I simply do not desire to wake up one day and find that someone has taken away everything I recognize as UNIX, and turned it into something which is only usable with a mindless point-and-drool interface that has been deemed "easier."
I am particularly opposed to any changes that consist of a database for configuration data, even if that database does successfully masquarade as a directory tree. The world is currently cursed with the misuse of complicated databases, where they present no clear advantage over human-readable text.
Because in order to use that database, I need interface software. And in order to use that interface software, I have to abandon the UNIX ways of doing things that I know and love.
I've used most of the "advanced" user interfaces for computers which have evolved over the past twenty years, and still find myself going back to this ancient, obscure text-based "UNIX" thing which was initially developed to operate, of all things, telephone switches.
I don't care if it'd be trivial to support both old- and new-school config files. It's more trivial than that just to leave it the hell alone.
Unless you've got actually got something substantially better (and believe me, it's been tried), please focus your efforts elsewhere.
Or, please do as I said previously, and buy a Mac - it's already finished, and it's for sale, right now. I understand that the Apple Store is running a special this week, too: They'll double the amount of inanity in your Mac for free, just for asking.
1. sendmail.cf is not meant to be human-readable, any more than an ELF binary is. It's meant to be readable by sendmail.
2. sendmail's m4 config scripts are very human readable, and way less noisey than XML.
3. You're not attempting to argue that Deep Magic is supposed to be easy, are you? Because if it were, it wouldn't be Magic, let alone Deep Magic.
4. Yes, the entire world should be aware that sendmail is fucked, by now. I stand by my assertions as to why it might still be in use. Attitude or no, I believe it to be true.
And finally: I agree that there should not be non-human-modifiable files under/etc. While we're at it, other machine-generated stuff like aliases.db should be moved out to somewhere else, too.
That you haven't taken to time to grok m4, does not a bad configuration system make. At least at some point, the stuff that comprises sendmail.cf is a very human-readable and easy to read m4 script, which is still way better than XML as a be-all, end-all solution.
Editing sendmail.cf by hand is only needed when you're working Deep Magic. And Deep Magic is supposed to be difficult and arcane. It's called "job security."
But it doesn't matter, anyway. Everyone knows that there's a number of better, easier, more flexible and more secure MTAs in the world. Those who still use sendmail are either:
a) masochists b) sufficiently socially inept that they're unable to convey just how fucked sendmail is to the requisite PHBs and get them to mandate something else
If everyone is off on some XML tangent, that must mean that everyone hates it.
On with Elektra. Here's the problems they state with the Way Things Are Done, along with their requisite Standard Rebuttal:
They don't have a common file format.
So what? They're different programs, written by different people, and doing different things in different ways. Of course they use different file formats for configuration.
Their location in the filesystem may be different from Linux distribution to distribution.
Yes. This is why they're called *different distributions.* If you want sameness, one could always run OSX on unremarkable Apple hardware.
When two different softwares want to integrate themselves, it is programatically very hard to read, understand and correctly change its partner's configuration file. Think about installing a third-party video driver in XFree86, a new Apache plug-in, etc, and letting this new piece of software do the integration automatically, instead of the sysadmin vi the configuration file, understand and change it in the right way. So basic software integration is a pain today for ISVs (Independent Software Vendors).
Would someone PLEASE show me a video driver which requires an Apache plug-in? I want the head of the maintainer.
And ISVs don't want their job made easier, or else they'd find themselves without one. Next.
A software developer must waste a lot of time to write the plumbing code for configuration file parsing etc. It is completelly out of his scope to write code to interoperate with other software's configurations files.
Right. It's right at the beginning, and easy enough to reuse if one is sticking with the GPL. Not Difficult.
Different distributions tend to place different software configuration in different places with different formats. A regular SuSE system administrator, for example, will be lost when asked to work in a Debian or Slackware system. Think about the most primitive example: network configuration parameters. Each distro has its own approach.
Shucks. You mean that HP/UX is different from Solaris? And all this time, I thought they named them differently for marketing purposes.
A system administrator must know all these formats.
That's why they're self-documenting and human-readable.
There is no way to know today what was changed in a specific configuration file. If/etc/shadow file time changes, there is no way to know if the change was related to nobody's or root's record.
Backups, backups, backups. Has nobody yet learned the purpose of a proper fucking backup regime? It's not just to recover from hardware failure, but to provide a window into the past. Snapshots, with FreeBSD and NetApps filers, make this easy. LVM snapshots under Linux are a bit more murky, but that's not LVM's fault, let alone/etc/shadow's.
Storage is cheap, and the components are there. Why hasn't anyone figured this out yet?
High-level system administration GUIs (webmin, redhat-config-*, SuSE's YAST, etc) are just a dream today. They can never track successfully all the changes that happens in the format of the configuration files of such a rich diversity of Open Source software (httpd.conf, smb.conf, modules.conf, fstab, etc, etc, etc). The approach of some of them is to keep the configuration ideas in a private database and regenerate the specific configuration file whenever a change happens in this database. Welcome to the inconsistency nightmare.
Webmin, and all of its evil little friends, consists of a crutch for those who want to operate UNIX machines, but don't want to learn more than Windows 95 taught them. That's not UNIX, and I therefore don't give a shit. Nor will any other administrator who knows the difference between csh, bash, ksh, less, and more.
[I was going to mod this as funny, but then I realized that at least two people already had, and that you weren't joking. So I'll just write something trite, instead.]
Look, kid, nobody likes XML, even if it is buzzword-compliant. XML is so bad that every implementation of anything which uses it is solely focused on translating the XML data into some other form that is actually usable.
Which is exactly what you're proposing: You suggest that the world convert the/etc heirarchy into a bunch of XML files which are so not useful by themselves, that they requires even more extra software just to interpret the shit.
Just to make myself abundantly clear right away: I hope that you're trolling, else I implore you to hang yourself before you do any more damage to the world than you already have.
In *nix, any configuration files are generally designed to be readable by humans. This is by design.
XML, meanwhile, is hard to read. It is, to select a singular adjective, "noisey." I don't like listening to radio static, or watching snowy TV signals; why would I want to look at or work with similarly noisey configuration files?
I use a generic tool every day called eyes, which works without installation on every UNIX-like machine that I've ever had to work on, including my Linksys router. Sometimes, my eyes don't work very well, but often contacts or glasses can help with that.
So, I carry a set of eyes and contacts with me wherever I go. Aside from those, all I need are standard UNIX tools to get the job done.
And my set of eyes has a much easier time parsing your first example than the second.
Why do you desire to take away my tools and replace them with the moral, conceptual, and visual equivilent to regedit? Is one coder's time worth the agony of the entire unix-using world?
I've got a Windows box in the next room for when I want to deal with that shit, and it is a loathesome day when I have to edit the registry for, well, anything. And it's not even so much the horrid organization which I dislike, but the visual presentation: Locked down and difficult to navigate, just like XML mandates.
5.76 * 60 = 345.6MB / second which is around 3.5 Gigabits/second. A dedicated OC-48 line (2.5 Gbits/sec) won't cut it
No data compression? Improbable. Even sending pixel-level information is unlikely, at best.
So hows abouts we just send polygons instead of pixels? I'm able to get reasonable frame rates with GLX over 100 megabit ethernet, today, so let's set that as the barrier for entry.
In the past 10 years, my downsteam has gone from 28.8kbps, all the way to 5mbps. I see no reason for that trend not to continue.
So, I'll go ahead and hold my breath for 100mbps. It can't be that far off. Meanwhile, you might want to learn a thing or two about modern computer graphics - these ain't just framebuffers anymore.
In these parts, both AOL and Earthlink are available over the cable TV coax. And Earthlink, at least, also offers DSL here. Competition? By your definition, they've been playing for the opponents for years...
Meanwhile, that same coaxial network was recently boosted to 5Mbps for, it seems, all connected residential subscribers for all connected services. And, to top it off, I do actually get that speed out of it consistant basis - in other words, it actually works. Today. Right now. Not "in a few months." It's live.
Thus, it seems that the connectivity you speak of happened some time ago, and that it's been doing nothing but getting better since then.
If the interior of the car is habitable for human occupants, then it is reasonable to assume that any modern installed electronics will survive just fine, as well.
For example:
Juan sprints from the climate-controlled oasis of his house, over to his VW. The handle of the car door scalds his hand when he touches it, but he opens it anyway and thrusts himself into the driver's seat.
"Jesus fuck," Juan says, "it's fucking hot in here." Juan keys the engine, rolls down all of the windows, and drives away.
Meanwhile, his Mac is booting up. And by the time it has been on long enough that heat build-up might be a real concern, the car's air conditioner has started producing cold, Juan has rolled up the windows, and things cool off rapidly.
See, Juan is going to make sure that his car is comfortable, automatically, because that's human nature. And if Juan is comfortable, then his computer is as well.
I'd not lose any sleep over this non-problem. One would probably suffer heat stroke before causing any meaningful damage to a modern computer in a car.
I'm still waiting for someone to tell me when it became assumed that the lawyers were in charge of such designations as "beta," particularly within an organization which is quite clearly operated by an army of engineers.
The problems are obvious, and you've already identified them.
But it's no different from anything else on today's Internet - there's single points of failure all over the place which can affect thousands of people at once.
Likewise, the power grid sure doesn't seem very grid-like when I'm waiting through a blackout.
*shrug*
The problems with range and penetration are not unique to 802.11, but exist with all unlicensed radio equipment, and are a function of a combination of physics and regulation.
Lower frequencies tend to penetrate solid materials better, but tend to suffer limited speed in practical use and are all gobbled up with commercial, public safety, and TV use. Higher frequencies tend to be more available, and are more easily absorbed and reflected by solid materials, but tend to have higher speeds in practical use.
In the US, there's very strict limits on spectrum usage and output power in the unlicensed ISM bands. Manufacturers don't make higher-powered equipment, because legally nobody (except for some amateur operators) would be able to use it.
That said, there's an obvious answer to the range and penetration thing. You just do the same thing you'd do if you wanted better TV reception: Buy a bigger antenna.
This isn't rocket science. Radio, at the level that you and I have to care about, hasn't changed a whole lot since the invention of the tuner.
If Google starts making money from other news sites without actually paying them, then they risk legal action for use of copyrighted material.
You mean, like Slashdot has been doing since before Google was a little more than an overactive synapse? Of course, Slashdot has ads, and subscriptions, and is clearly motivated by profit. Is Rob Malda going to prison now? ($250k+5 years*how many articles with verbatim quotations?)
Fair use allows for this sort of thing. It is not written, "Thou shalt not make money."
Nor is it written "Though shalt not commit copyright infringement with non-beta software." I mean: WTF? It's a technical distinction. It has no legal or business meaning. To the technical people, it means simply: This is not yet deemed finished.
The Google News summaries are sufficiently sparse that I glean little more from them than I do passing by a newspaper box on the street. They're an insubstantial part of the copyrighted work. This is generally and historically OK, as long as you specifically are not Chuck D of Public Enemy.
You might do well to read up on copyright law. A good place to start might be here. A good place to end might be here.
Thank you.
Re:NOTE: This will erase all data...
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Build Your Own PBX
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Geez.
Us Gentoo folk just emerge asterisk, and call it a day. No data loss required.
Why, sure. But using Forecast Fox is not even close to using like weather.com as a web page, is it? It's more properly described as scraping weather.com to glean the few non-useless bits of information that it does contain.
I scrape weather.com on occassion, as well, if I'm sitting on the couch listening to music with XBMC and feel like checking the forecast. I'm in no way annoyed by this, and it does work rather well.
The Weather Channel has never had a useful web site. It has always been an epitome of anything which can be annoying, insipid, and featureless, consisting of little but regurgitated and labotomized government weather data and the occasional and blatant attempt to extort money from users. (At one time, they wanted paid for the singular effort of delivering storm alerts to my pager. By e-mail. Absurd.)
Back In The Day, before the rest of the world had heard much about this whole InterWeb thing, the University of Michigan started giving away weather information online. It seemed to grew in the altruistic sort of way that many things seemed to back then, steadily aquiring new features and formats for no apparant reason except that it was possible to do so.
Today, following the general trend, the efforts are commercialized (read: the staff needed to eat and pay rent), but quite clearly live on at The Weather Underground.
Sure, there's ads. But there's a wealth of good information, a feeling of completeness, and a general lack of bullshit and dumbness which is so sorely lacking with things like weather.com. A subscription to toss the ads and enable a couple of different features is a miniscule $5/year, which I've been happily paying for the last several years.
The information there is continuously improving. For example, they've been putting a lot of effort into their detailed radar presentations over the past year, which has really made a difference in seeing what's about to go on outside.
I like Google and the effort they put into user interfaces, simplicity, and completeness (except for when they most recently fucked up groups.google.com), but given the efforts of wunderground, I really don't care if Google ever gets into the weather business.
[ObDisclaimer: I didn't attend UMich, I don't even think I know anyone who has, and I definately have no interest in boosting wunderground traffic except, perhaps, to help people stay informed.]
Try to avoid version 2.2 of this router if you're at all interested in more advanced networking stuff (VLAN, per-port QoS, etc).
Versions 2.2 use an Atmel ethernet bridge chip which supports all sorts of management tricks, many of which are supported in the Sveasoft firmware. This makes some things very easy - you can run an ethernet drop your neighbor's house and give them their own VLAN to keep them out of your network, for example. Or plug your VoIP terminal into its own port, and give that physical port QoS priority over everything else.
It's almost like having a Linux box with five independant ethernet interfaces, plus 802.11g, for $60 (!).
Version 2.2, which is the latest at this time, is essentially the same unit except that it contains a cheap unmanaged Broadcom ethernet bridge. Which works fine, except that your potentially lovely 5-port networking monster just turned into a 2-port model with a built-in dumb 10/100 switch. Which means that you'll need at least two of 'em (or a whole different plan) to split the cable bill with your neighbors, no more per-port QoS, and such.
Otherwise, they'll all run the same firmwares, and are feature- (and cost) identical.
Buy an Xbox, an SP/DIF dongle for it, and install XBMC. Plug it into a good outboard converter or your surround reciever, as dictated by taste and equipment. It will play whatever audio format you decide on, either from its own (upgradable) hard drive or across a network.
To my ears, with my system, it sounds indistinguishable from the Carver TL-3300 CD player that I've used as a reference for the past decade. And the organizational features of XBMC are second to none for any system capable of being operated sans mouse/keyboard.
Note, however, that listening to music isn't as much fun once it becomes computer-based and completely intangible, even if it does sound the same. There's nothing tactile or visual about it. It's just a sterile index of music. The disparity is not unlike a flipping through a card catalog instead walking through a gallery.
XBMC's relatively slick handling of cover art and biographical information helps a bit, but it's still very impersonal.
Slashdot Mirror
If there is a backdoor in VOIP, what is to stop vonage employees from listening in and recording conversations for their own shits and giggles?
Boredom.
A long time ago, when cordless phones were beginning to be popular and they all operated at 49MHz, I got a scanner.
After a while, I got sick of listening to the parks department talk about lawn mowers, and the police department talk about donuts. So I nuked that stuff, and programmed it for cordless phones.
And let me tell you that there was nothing more insipid to hear than a phone call between a boy and a girl. The rest of the calls were just as bad: Dinner at 6? You want me to bring home pizza or chicken? Yes, I'd like to drop off the kids tomorrow morning. No, it just started this shimmy-ing in the front-end, but only when... Martha, just like I said, the man at the bank says...
And that's just the purposeful calls. The vast majority of telephone calls are just mindless banter between two equally-mindless nits, with no clear objective or reason.
I listened to a few calls, for a few days, and then never got back to doing it. It wasn't fun. Nobody ever said anything interesting. I went back to playing video games, listening to music, and doing the BBS thing with my (then) copious spare time.
You're too fucking BORING to be worried about privacy.
There's all this talk here about audio cabling and listening and such, but TFA wants to know about video cabling.
It's just 75-ohm coaxial cable. It's a hand-me-down from the broadcast and defense industries.
If you were a broadcaster, you'd care about flexibility and long-term durability, and buy good professional-grade stranded-conductor RG-59 from someone like Canare, like just about all of the other broadcasters do for their temporary video interconnects. You'd then solder or (preferably) crimp your own connectors on, because then the resultant cables would both the proper length for whatever you're doing and you'd know that they were assembled correctly. Or, you'd have a company like Markertek assemble them for you.
But you're not a broadcaster. Nobody is throwing your wires across the room. Nobody is walking or driving on them. Nobody is using them to rig lights or props with.
You don't give a whit whether it's stranded or not, because it will be relocated (at most) several times a year - instead of, perhaps, several times per hour in a production studio. You do, however, care if they're assembled correctly.
And you care about having the proper length - extra cable length is hard to deal with in the typical home theater, and always reduces signal quality.
You also care about bandwidth, perhaps even more than the broadcasters do. But that's not a huge problem, as NTSC video only goes up to a few MHz.
RG-59 [1] is typically used at hundreds of MHz (think: cable TV), and is thus way more than sufficient.
So here's what you do. Buy some good, solid copper RG-59 from Lowe's, Home Depot, your local electrical contractor shop, or wherever. Look for cable that is shielded with foil and a braid, with a foam dielectric. And also buy a crimper. And some connectors. And a rotary stripper.
It's fairly self-explanatory from then on out:
Measure, cut, strip, mash, crimp. Boneheaded cable installers can do this stuff all day - any Slashdotter can tackle it without episode. Plan on wasting an end or two if you're unsure of yourself, but it really is bloody simple.
Just try to keep the three component video cables all at the same length, to keep things in sync with eachother. This isn't hyper-critical, given the real-world propagation delay of RG-59, but it's easy to keep things within an inch or so of sameness and so one might as well try.
You'll spend less on the kit than for a single set of most "Monster" cables, and likely be able to make hundreds of feet worth of custom, high-quality video interconnects with it instead of having just one set of gaudy purple wires that are all the wrong length.
And since RG-59 is so good that nobody outside of a marketing department has bothered to replace it after numerous decades, you should be good for a long, long time.
Enjoy.
[1]: Yep, I said RG-59. There's no cause to use RG-6 with baseband video signals, as there's simply insufficient bandwidth utilization and attenuation to justify the expense and added unmanagibility of RG-6. And it's easy to find reasonably decent copper RG-59, while the RG-6 typically available at retail uses a cheap copper-clad steel center conductor, which operates poorly at these frequencies (but works fine and saves money for satellite installations). And as far as anyone knew, RG-59 was sufficient for all residential video purposes until the advent of DSS, two-way cablevision, and 125-channel tuners. RG-59 is, in fact, overkill for this application. I don't care which one is bigger: RG-6 is just pissing away cash, unless you've already got some on-hand.
All that verbiage, but this substance sticks out. Verbatim, and complete, because it's good:
/bin waiting to be used.
/etc, and everything else usable with a modern UNIX box.
Do you really honestly believe that there is no room for improvement in our "Unix" way of doing things and that it will exist forever? And therefore we shouldn't try anything new? I mean.. I'm sure there were folks who swore by hand wiring their computer's logic because it gave them more control than early micro-chips. But there's a certain over-arching concept in the whole world of computing that abstraction eventually makes technology more powerful. Lets say that a new generation of admin tools actually works at some point. Suppose it actually becomes much faster, safer, and powerful to configure your Unix system from a GUI. You can accept this and say to yourself, "well.. this does actually work.. and now I have more free time to try completely new things." Or you can say, "Heck with this.. I'm doing things the old way even if they are inferior" and eventually lose your job as everyone else moves on. I'm not claiming this is just around the corner, but it will happen someday so you might as well be ready for it.
I would adore changes to the UNIX way which would help me do things faster, easier, and better.
But, I anticipate that it is impossible without much more significant effort than has been happening.
It boils down to this: None of this GUI stuff (including, for the sake of argument, clever ncurses hacks) uses any existing UNIX methodology for Getting Things Done, even though much of it is sitting right there under
Instead, each and every time, the overtly-creative GUI artist creates their own set of tools, and their own requisite interface with which to use them.
If the individual were to implement the flexibility of UNIX (and more; remember, it's gotta be an improvement or there's zero advantage) in their graphical configurator, then so be it - I'd jump ship immediately and start singing its praises.
But to re-implement UNIX's functionality would be a daunting task, now wouldn't it?
There is a clear divergence between traditional UNIX commands and more recent GUI modernisms. The two of them, seemingly as a rule, are anything but complementary.
This is a problem. When operating my E16/Xorg/2.6.11 desktop, I find that nothing that I tend to click on has any relationship to anything that I tend to type.
Every GUI application has its own silly user interface, with its own silly limitations. Repetitious actions abound for the simplest of activities, and my fingers (and mind) quickly grow tired of doing the same things over and over.
Meanwhile, every text-mode application has the power of UNIX behind it. Text gets munged, pipes (with and without names) shoot data between what, until a few minutes prior, were completely unrelated programs. Work Gets Done, scripted in advance, while I fetch myself some more coffee. Efficiency.
Thus, to summarize, if one wants to train the old-school away from traditional UNIX commands for daily activities, one must first make the new way at least as efficient of a system as the old way is, which will be very hard to accomplish and will involve much re-invention of hundreds of wheels.
And inventing a new scripting language is probably not-so-good, either - else, I'd have been using GimpFU for automatic image resizing instead of of the ImageMagick and shell script mumbo-jumbo that I've been relying on for all these years.
See, I don't want to learn GimpFU, even if it is better. I want to learn bash, and learn it well, ONE TIME. And then I want to proceed with getting things done, with JPEGs, and MP3s, and Postfix, a 3-gigabyte mbox,
One might gain success with their efforts if they included traditional ways with their new GUI-esque efforts. But, AFAICT, this has never been done.
I want to grep spoonboy | sed /
2000 -was- a long time ago.
And a fully believe that you edited it by hand.
I've done it, myself, last in 1998.
In the present (which is right now, not henceforth from five years ago), that doesn't have to happen.
I'm done now.
Thanks again for your effort.
*sigh*
It is true that one needed to fondle sendmail.cf by hand, a Long Time Ago, and that it was not a fun time.
But the only realistic scenario here is this: m4 has been around long enough that anyone not capable of using it at their location (because their sendmail was Really, Really Old) has probably already been 0wned, and been forced to upgrade or move to something different.
sendmail.cf has moved on. It is not intended for human consumption. It states as much on the very first line of the file.
For reference, see "past tense" and "present tense" in any good book on the English language.
Thanks again.
UNIX ceases to be UNIX when it doesn't feel like UNIX anymore.
I define UNIX as a set of simple, standardized tools (awk, sed, man, cat, and friends), and a way to tie them together (the shell), along with a multitasking, multiuser enviroment, and simple configuration that can be handled from a teletype.
Webmin presents none of these things. It is therefore not UNIX. With Webmin, and its ilk, it doesn't matter that the system is all running under the Linux kernel.
The end user is never exposed to the things that make a UNIX machine a UNIX machine. It is therefore, for all purposes, not a UNIX machine. It might as well be running under Win2k3 with cygwin.dll.
I am vehemently against even the mere dilution of anything UNIX. I like the system, and I (a user, an administrator) have an easier time using it efficiently than I ever have anything else.
I am motivated in this effort by fear, but it's not at all irrational. I simply do not desire to wake up one day and find that someone has taken away everything I recognize as UNIX, and turned it into something which is only usable with a mindless point-and-drool interface that has been deemed "easier."
I am particularly opposed to any changes that consist of a database for configuration data, even if that database does successfully masquarade as a directory tree. The world is currently cursed with the misuse of complicated databases, where they present no clear advantage over human-readable text.
Because in order to use that database, I need interface software. And in order to use that interface software, I have to abandon the UNIX ways of doing things that I know and love.
I've used most of the "advanced" user interfaces for computers which have evolved over the past twenty years, and still find myself going back to this ancient, obscure text-based "UNIX" thing which was initially developed to operate, of all things, telephone switches.
I don't care if it'd be trivial to support both old- and new-school config files. It's more trivial than that just to leave it the hell alone.
Unless you've got actually got something substantially better (and believe me, it's been tried), please focus your efforts elsewhere.
Or, please do as I said previously, and buy a Mac - it's already finished, and it's for sale, right now. I understand that the Apple Store is running a special this week, too: They'll double the amount of inanity in your Mac for free, just for asking.
I think what you meant to say was: "...my point was valid years and years ago."
Thanks for playing.
To summarize and enumerate and reply:
/etc. While we're at it, other machine-generated stuff like aliases.db should be moved out to somewhere else, too.
1. sendmail.cf is not meant to be human-readable, any more than an ELF binary is. It's meant to be readable by sendmail.
2. sendmail's m4 config scripts are very human readable, and way less noisey than XML.
3. You're not attempting to argue that Deep Magic is supposed to be easy, are you? Because if it were, it wouldn't be Magic, let alone Deep Magic.
4. Yes, the entire world should be aware that sendmail is fucked, by now. I stand by my assertions as to why it might still be in use. Attitude or no, I believe it to be true.
And finally: I agree that there should not be non-human-modifiable files under
One acronym: RTFM.
That you haven't taken to time to grok m4, does not a bad configuration system make. At least at some point, the stuff that comprises sendmail.cf is a very human-readable and easy to read m4 script, which is still way better than XML as a be-all, end-all solution.
Editing sendmail.cf by hand is only needed when you're working Deep Magic. And Deep Magic is supposed to be difficult and arcane. It's called "job security."
But it doesn't matter, anyway. Everyone knows that there's a number of better, easier, more flexible and more secure MTAs in the world. Those who still use sendmail are either:
a) masochists
b) sufficiently socially inept that they're unable to convey just how fucked sendmail is to the requisite PHBs and get them to mandate something else
or
c) both
If everyone is off on some XML tangent, that must mean that everyone hates it.
/etc/shadow file time changes, there is no way to know if the change was related to nobody's or root's record.
/etc/shadow's.
On with Elektra. Here's the problems they state with the Way Things Are Done, along with their requisite Standard Rebuttal:
They don't have a common file format.
So what? They're different programs, written by different people, and doing different things in different ways. Of course they use different file formats for configuration.
Their location in the filesystem may be different from Linux distribution to distribution.
Yes. This is why they're called *different distributions.* If you want sameness, one could always run OSX on unremarkable Apple hardware.
When two different softwares want to integrate themselves, it is programatically very hard to read, understand and correctly change its partner's configuration file. Think about installing a third-party video driver in XFree86, a new Apache plug-in, etc, and letting this new piece of software do the integration automatically, instead of the sysadmin vi the configuration file, understand and change it in the right way. So basic software integration is a pain today for ISVs (Independent Software Vendors).
Would someone PLEASE show me a video driver which requires an Apache plug-in? I want the head of the maintainer.
And ISVs don't want their job made easier, or else they'd find themselves without one. Next.
A software developer must waste a lot of time to write the plumbing code for configuration file parsing etc. It is completelly out of his scope to write code to interoperate with other software's configurations files.
Right. It's right at the beginning, and easy enough to reuse if one is sticking with the GPL. Not Difficult.
Different distributions tend to place different software configuration in different places with different formats. A regular SuSE system administrator, for example, will be lost when asked to work in a Debian or Slackware system. Think about the most primitive example: network configuration parameters. Each distro has its own approach.
Shucks. You mean that HP/UX is different from Solaris? And all this time, I thought they named them differently for marketing purposes.
A system administrator must know all these formats.
That's why they're self-documenting and human-readable.
There is no way to know today what was changed in a specific configuration file. If
Backups, backups, backups. Has nobody yet learned the purpose of a proper fucking backup regime? It's not just to recover from hardware failure, but to provide a window into the past. Snapshots, with FreeBSD and NetApps filers, make this easy. LVM snapshots under Linux are a bit more murky, but that's not LVM's fault, let alone
Storage is cheap, and the components are there. Why hasn't anyone figured this out yet?
High-level system administration GUIs (webmin, redhat-config-*, SuSE's YAST, etc) are just a dream today. They can never track successfully all the changes that happens in the format of the configuration files of such a rich diversity of Open Source software (httpd.conf, smb.conf, modules.conf, fstab, etc, etc, etc). The approach of some of them is to keep the configuration ideas in a private database and regenerate the specific configuration file whenever a change happens in this database. Welcome to the inconsistency nightmare.
Webmin, and all of its evil little friends, consists of a crutch for those who want to operate UNIX machines, but don't want to learn more than Windows 95 taught them. That's not UNIX, and I therefore don't give a shit. Nor will any other administrator who knows the difference between csh, bash, ksh, less, and more.
[I was going to mod this as funny, but then I realized that at least two people already had, and that you weren't joking. So I'll just write something trite, instead.]
/etc heirarchy into a bunch of XML files which are so not useful by themselves, that they requires even more extra software just to interpret the shit.
Look, kid, nobody likes XML, even if it is buzzword-compliant. XML is so bad that every implementation of anything which uses it is solely focused on translating the XML data into some other form that is actually usable.
Which is exactly what you're proposing: You suggest that the world convert the
Just to make myself abundantly clear right away: I hope that you're trolling, else I implore you to hang yourself before you do any more damage to the world than you already have.
In *nix, any configuration files are generally designed to be readable by humans. This is by design.
XML, meanwhile, is hard to read. It is, to select a singular adjective, "noisey." I don't like listening to radio static, or watching snowy TV signals; why would I want to look at or work with similarly noisey configuration files?
I use a generic tool every day called eyes, which works without installation on every UNIX-like machine that I've ever had to work on, including my Linksys router. Sometimes, my eyes don't work very well, but often contacts or glasses can help with that.
So, I carry a set of eyes and contacts with me wherever I go. Aside from those, all I need are standard UNIX tools to get the job done.
And my set of eyes has a much easier time parsing your first example than the second.
Why do you desire to take away my tools and replace them with the moral, conceptual, and visual equivilent to regedit? Is one coder's time worth the agony of the entire unix-using world?
I've got a Windows box in the next room for when I want to deal with that shit, and it is a loathesome day when I have to edit the registry for, well, anything. And it's not even so much the horrid organization which I dislike, but the visual presentation: Locked down and difficult to navigate, just like XML mandates.
Go fuck yourself. HAND.
5.76 * 60 = 345.6MB / second which is around 3.5 Gigabits/second. A dedicated OC-48 line (2.5 Gbits/sec) won't cut it
No data compression? Improbable. Even sending pixel-level information is unlikely, at best.
So hows abouts we just send polygons instead of pixels? I'm able to get reasonable frame rates with GLX over 100 megabit ethernet, today, so let's set that as the barrier for entry.
In the past 10 years, my downsteam has gone from 28.8kbps, all the way to 5mbps. I see no reason for that trend not to continue.
So, I'll go ahead and hold my breath for 100mbps. It can't be that far off. Meanwhile, you might want to learn a thing or two about modern computer graphics - these ain't just framebuffers anymore.
I'd rather have IMAP.
Eh?
This isn't California, but the technological backwoods known as Ohio.
I think you've missed your boat (again).
I'm not sure what you mean.
In these parts, both AOL and Earthlink are available over the cable TV coax. And Earthlink, at least, also offers DSL here. Competition? By your definition, they've been playing for the opponents for years...
Meanwhile, that same coaxial network was recently boosted to 5Mbps for, it seems, all connected residential subscribers for all connected services. And, to top it off, I do actually get that speed out of it consistant basis - in other words, it actually works. Today. Right now. Not "in a few months." It's live.
Thus, it seems that the connectivity you speak of happened some time ago, and that it's been doing nothing but getting better since then.
If the interior of the car is habitable for human occupants, then it is reasonable to assume that any modern installed electronics will survive just fine, as well.
For example:
Juan sprints from the climate-controlled oasis of his house, over to his VW. The handle of the car door scalds his hand when he touches it, but he opens it anyway and thrusts himself into the driver's seat.
"Jesus fuck," Juan says, "it's fucking hot in here." Juan keys the engine, rolls down all of the windows, and drives away.
Meanwhile, his Mac is booting up. And by the time it has been on long enough that heat build-up might be a real concern, the car's air conditioner has started producing cold, Juan has rolled up the windows, and things cool off rapidly.
See, Juan is going to make sure that his car is comfortable, automatically, because that's human nature. And if Juan is comfortable, then his computer is as well.
I'd not lose any sleep over this non-problem. One would probably suffer heat stroke before causing any meaningful damage to a modern computer in a car.
I'm still waiting for someone to tell me when it became assumed that the lawyers were in charge of such designations as "beta," particularly within an organization which is quite clearly operated by an army of engineers.
The problems are obvious, and you've already identified them.
But it's no different from anything else on today's Internet - there's single points of failure all over the place which can affect thousands of people at once.
Likewise, the power grid sure doesn't seem very grid-like when I'm waiting through a blackout.
*shrug*
The problems with range and penetration are not unique to 802.11, but exist with all unlicensed radio equipment, and are a function of a combination of physics and regulation.
Lower frequencies tend to penetrate solid materials better, but tend to suffer limited speed in practical use and are all gobbled up with commercial, public safety, and TV use. Higher frequencies tend to be more available, and are more easily absorbed and reflected by solid materials, but tend to have higher speeds in practical use.
In the US, there's very strict limits on spectrum usage and output power in the unlicensed ISM bands. Manufacturers don't make higher-powered equipment, because legally nobody (except for some amateur operators) would be able to use it.
That said, there's an obvious answer to the range and penetration thing. You just do the same thing you'd do if you wanted better TV reception: Buy a bigger antenna.
This isn't rocket science. Radio, at the level that you and I have to care about, hasn't changed a whole lot since the invention of the tuner.
If Google starts making money from other news sites without actually paying them, then they risk legal action for use of copyrighted material.
You mean, like Slashdot has been doing since before Google was a little more than an overactive synapse? Of course, Slashdot has ads, and subscriptions, and is clearly motivated by profit. Is Rob Malda going to prison now? ($250k+5 years*how many articles with verbatim quotations?)
Fair use allows for this sort of thing. It is not written, "Thou shalt not make money."
Nor is it written "Though shalt not commit copyright infringement with non-beta software." I mean: WTF? It's a technical distinction. It has no legal or business meaning. To the technical people, it means simply: This is not yet deemed finished.
The Google News summaries are sufficiently sparse that I glean little more from them than I do passing by a newspaper box on the street. They're an insubstantial part of the copyrighted work. This is generally and historically OK, as long as you specifically are not Chuck D of Public Enemy.
You might do well to read up on copyright law. A good place to start might be here. A good place to end might be here.
Thank you.
Geez.
Us Gentoo folk just emerge asterisk, and call it a day. No data loss required.
*shrug*
(-1, Flamebait)
Why, sure. But using Forecast Fox is not even close to using like weather.com as a web page, is it? It's more properly described as scraping weather.com to glean the few non-useless bits of information that it does contain.
I scrape weather.com on occassion, as well, if I'm sitting on the couch listening to music with XBMC and feel like checking the forecast. I'm in no way annoyed by this, and it does work rather well.
But you're absolutely kidding yourself if you really think that either of these methods in any way enable you to experience all that is useless about weather.com. For that, you need a web browser, like God intended, and a LINK TO THE PAGE. CLICK HERE NOW! FREE WEATHER INFORMATION. Check out the new 2006 Buick lineup! CONSUME! OBEY!
Not to sound like spam, but:
The Weather Channel has never had a useful web site. It has always been an epitome of anything which can be annoying, insipid, and featureless, consisting of little but regurgitated and labotomized government weather data and the occasional and blatant attempt to extort money from users. (At one time, they wanted paid for the singular effort of delivering storm alerts to my pager. By e-mail. Absurd.)
Back In The Day, before the rest of the world had heard much about this whole InterWeb thing, the University of Michigan started giving away weather information online. It seemed to grew in the altruistic sort of way that many things seemed to back then, steadily aquiring new features and formats for no apparant reason except that it was possible to do so.
That started 15 years ago.
Today, following the general trend, the efforts are commercialized (read: the staff needed to eat and pay rent), but quite clearly live on at The Weather Underground.
Sure, there's ads. But there's a wealth of good information, a feeling of completeness, and a general lack of bullshit and dumbness which is so sorely lacking with things like weather.com. A subscription to toss the ads and enable a couple of different features is a miniscule $5/year, which I've been happily paying for the last several years.
The information there is continuously improving. For example, they've been putting a lot of effort into their detailed radar presentations over the past year, which has really made a difference in seeing what's about to go on outside.
I like Google and the effort they put into user interfaces, simplicity, and completeness (except for when they most recently fucked up groups.google.com), but given the efforts of wunderground, I really don't care if Google ever gets into the weather business.
[ObDisclaimer: I didn't attend UMich, I don't even think I know anyone who has, and I definately have no interest in boosting wunderground traffic except, perhaps, to help people stay informed.]
Yes. Yes, I did.
Slashdot ate my less-than symbol.
To summarize:
v2.0 and prior versions of the WRT54G are excellent.
v2.2 is also excellent, though less featureful.
And, to be complete:
The WRT54GS v1.0 is excellent, and has twice as much ram as a v2.x WRT54G, along with VLAN abilities.
The WRT54GS v1.1 is also excellent, and also sports extra RAM, but suffers from the same limited Broadcom bridge chip as the v2.2 WRT54G.
For anyone looking to buy a WRT54G:
Try to avoid version 2.2 of this router if you're at all interested in more advanced networking stuff (VLAN, per-port QoS, etc).
Versions 2.2 use an Atmel ethernet bridge chip which supports all sorts of management tricks, many of which are supported in the Sveasoft firmware. This makes some things very easy - you can run an ethernet drop your neighbor's house and give them their own VLAN to keep them out of your network, for example. Or plug your VoIP terminal into its own port, and give that physical port QoS priority over everything else.
It's almost like having a Linux box with five independant ethernet interfaces, plus 802.11g, for $60 (!).
Version 2.2, which is the latest at this time, is essentially the same unit except that it contains a cheap unmanaged Broadcom ethernet bridge. Which works fine, except that your potentially lovely 5-port networking monster just turned into a 2-port model with a built-in dumb 10/100 switch. Which means that you'll need at least two of 'em (or a whole different plan) to split the cable bill with your neighbors, no more per-port QoS, and such.
Otherwise, they'll all run the same firmwares, and are feature- (and cost) identical.
FYI.
Buy an Xbox, an SP/DIF dongle for it, and install XBMC. Plug it into a good outboard converter or your surround reciever, as dictated by taste and equipment. It will play whatever audio format you decide on, either from its own (upgradable) hard drive or across a network.
To my ears, with my system, it sounds indistinguishable from the Carver TL-3300 CD player that I've used as a reference for the past decade. And the organizational features of XBMC are second to none for any system capable of being operated sans mouse/keyboard.
Note, however, that listening to music isn't as much fun once it becomes computer-based and completely intangible, even if it does sound the same. There's nothing tactile or visual about it. It's just a sterile index of music. The disparity is not unlike a flipping through a card catalog instead walking through a gallery.
XBMC's relatively slick handling of cover art and biographical information helps a bit, but it's still very impersonal.
Keep your CDs around.