Does anyone else find it strange that a/. reader was also reading Fox News?
Um, no. I look at all the points of view as do many slashdotters. Some are so out there to be laughable. Looked at any of the over unity and free energy machines lately? Reading Fox News does not mean SUCKER. It means the truth is out there and as with anything online, most of it has to be taken with a grain of salt. The tried and true shines, the false gets exposed, the true exposed as false is sometimes vindicated.
Seen the videos on the explosions in the World Trade Center? The fuel is not hot enough to melt steel is a theory. Seen the video of the gas truck fire under the overpass in California this year? That should not have been hot enough to melt steel either.
Anybody who has done any blacksmithing knows steel softens before it melts. That failure was not from melted steel. It was from softened steel.
I like the beams cut at an angle by thermite.. Truly said by someone who hasn't used a cutting tourch and thermite. Doing a diagonal straight cut on a beam with thermite is an act of magic. Cutting a beam with a cutting torch in a straight diagonal with slag is normal.
I know, this is not the target group for this as most slashdotters have never used a cutting torch. This is why the bent truth is accepted by many. So few are in the field to know anything about working, cutting, anealing, hardening, steel to know it's properties. Someone looked up the melting point of steel and ran with the numbers assuming full strength up to the melting point. Steel is not the same as frozen water.
One looking at tire tracks from a bycycle in the sand see a close corrolation between the tracks positive one influences the other. This is much like the debate on global warming. The cause and effect can be assumed wrong even though there is a strong relationship between them. Does CO2 levels lead temprature swings? Does Temprature swings lead to a rise in CO2 levels? Just like the bike on the beach, twisting the back wheel can cause some influence of the front wheel. Burning a candle in late November gives off heat and may cause your house to overheat. The arrival of Winter or Summer may have more effect on the room temprature than lighting a candle. There is absolutely no denying a candle burning in a house puts heat, CO2 and water vapor into the house. Rning with that without checking the outside weather is foolish. Check the Mars ice caps and compare it to ours. We are burning a candle and adding heat, CO2 and Water to our atmosphere. Has anybody checked the outside season?
Next time you find tracks in the sand, notice the distance from the tangent of one wheel is fixed to the line of the other track, but the reverse is not true. The rear wheel always points to the track of the front wheel at a fixed distance. The tangent of the front wheel track does not point to the track of the rear wheel at a fixed distance. From the tracks, we can find out the direction the bicycle traveled and the distance between the front and rear wheels. Learn to look at more than the fact the two tracks are never more than 4 feet apart. Look at the whole data set for additional info.
With the additional info, and knowledge of a bycyle, If you said lets follow the tracks down the hill to see where they go. I would know enough to know if the bike indeed went down the hill or up.
From CO2 and temprature charts, not only do we see that temprature and CO2 seem to travel together, but look to see which level leads the other and by how long. From there it can be proven whether CO2 leads or Temprature leads. (Hint.. it's about a 4 year latency)
Reading Fox news and other sources is a good idea. Bad data can be culled by testing it with a few sanity checks. It requires knowledge, research, and the ability to think. Never take the news at face value.
The next time you look at the Trade Center melted steel theory, learn about heat treating steel. Here
He claims to actually do what he appears to be doing with the power of his mind.
I wonder whatever happened to the online challange from a few years back where a live webcam was locked into a safe with something else. The challange was to move things in the locked safe with the mind.
I haven't heard anything about it in years. I don't think anybody moved anything in the safe.
Same reason given in the article. To be prevent being taken advantage of. Same reason I don't post my/. password, my credit card number, exp date code on the back, and SSN.
Let's face it, we have something to hide. Having nothing to hide is simply an illusion. If you have nothing to hide, post your street address, promise to not press charges and I'll gladly open your mail for you. We have pretty strong penalties for mail theft for good reason.
E-mail doesn't have the same expected protection because it transverses so many servers and routers in plaintext. It is not in a secure (paper) wrapper to prevent reading/copying/archiving so it is well known that email is a target of inspection. It's viewable with no trace unlike it's paper counterpart.
Cell phone calls are protected by law unless monitored by the government, but that is the same for your copper POTS line. In both instances, illegal taps are possible and do happen. It boils down to the risk of getting caught.
And yet you reserve time for "watching the packets" to see if anyone has pwned your network yet? Wow.
It isn't hard. It's mostly automated. If I'm out and there is a burst of traffic, it requires investigating. Some rules when violated send an alert.
Due to a few open unsecured AP's in the neighberhood, I haven't had activity in over a year. It's pretty low maitenence/low risk. It's simply easier to go elsewhere.
Take an old P2 box and install snort between your internet wired router and your wireless router and LAN. Set alerts and check it once in a while if you don't hear from it.
As far as someone pwned the network, remember, I have more than one router. It's not all on the same LAN segment. Wireless mostly goes to a gateway router and a couple networked printers. The rest of the lan is further NAT'ed. Good luck.
I've heard of several problems with the upgrade from Dapper to Edgy, so I have been avoiding that upgrade. Most of the Forums recommend a new install instead. With a new install, you need to reset most everyting and start over with non-free codecs, MTP Library for the Zen, drivers & apps for the video capture card, configuring Myth, e-mail, Flash 9, Flashblock, etc. For me the re-configure would be times 3.. My laptop, my kids desktop, and my dual boot desktop.
In the meantime, I'm enjoying the sunshine. I'll save that one for a rainy day. I'm not willing to set aside a sunny day just incase the upgrade has problems and requires more time to tweak. As a noob, many of these tasks require quite a bit of time in Google searches.
I don't buy the "safe enough" arguments. It's broken. Friends don't let friends use WEP.
Swing by and leach then. Good luck. I use more then 1 router. WEP may be weak on the wireless level.. but it's not the only level of protection.
Notice in my original post the requirement to assign a static IP, manualy assign DNS, gateway, etc. Remember I use more than 1 router. You would need to be pretty dedicated to analise the packets to properly configure a working connection without being noticed. I watch the packets also.
However I am running Kubuntu Feisty. Maybe it's time for an upgrade?
Probably true. I'm running Dapper because I have a life. I spend little time as a noob putzing with it. I'm more of an end user. I settled on Dapper because it is the LTS version so I wouldn't have to be on the 6 month upgrade cycle.
Anyway, in a couple years, I'll upgrade. In the meantime I'll enjoy the sunshine and warm weather, camping, etc. When rainy weather sets in and I have time to blow my install and learn how to recover it, I'll ditz with it.
Non-rechargeable alkalines are wasteful and damaging to the environment. You were of course speaking of rechargeable Ni or Li batteries right?
Um no. Spending $50 for 4 extra sets of batteries that will rot in a drawer is a waste of resources. The extra batteries is for when you run completely through your regular stock of rechargable batteries on a high demand job.
Having an overly large stock of rechargable batteries is a total waste. You toss them into a charger and when needed you find the set of 4 doesn't work because one died 6 months ago and you didn't catch it. In the field you miss the shot trying to sort out the dud and finding a working replacement.. Not a good idea. I work with a smaller pool of batteries that get regularly rotated, tested and known to work well. Even single cells are in the rotation. I feed them to my MP3 player. When on a shoot, I can depend on them. When a surge in demand exceeds my supply of charged cells, regular disposable batteries is better than being dead in the water. Even these if not used can be used in low current applications such as the clocks arround the house, pagers, TV/VCR remotes, standby flashlight by the electrical panel, and other items rechargable batteries are poorly suited for due to their self discharge. A secondary stock of regular batteries is cheap, pretty foolproof, and can be easly adjusted to match the anticipated job in a pinch.
A 36 pack of AA's at Costco is under $15. It's cheap insurance for a long shoot. Having that many NiMH cells is a total waste of money.
As I stated before, my trip to Hawaii used quite a few alkaline batteries. Since then, I haven't needed any in several years. I got my shots. I don't have a large surplus of NiMH batteries expirieng.
At work they recycle all types.. Li, Carbon-Zinc, Alkaline, coin Lithium, NiMH and Lead Acid.
I thought you were onto something until I realized you might not be running Linux over wireless by this statement;
Everybody knows WEP is a waste of time. If you really want your wireless to be secure, just wrap the access point in a HEPA filter, but make sure you cover your laptop with the exact same grade of filter, to ensure compatibility. THAT will keep the undesirables out (assuming they are larger than.3 microns).
Have you had any luck using WPA on an older distro such as Dapper? I set up to get connected. I live on the end of a road and have brick exterior so signal offsite is wimpy. Not too many wardrivers find me and there are lots of unsecured points nearby so I'm not a high profile target.
It's like being in the jungle with a companion and being attacked by a lion. I don't have to outrun the lion. I just have to run faster than my companion.
The purchasing part is hard to do when the same model comes with a different chipset each day, depending on constellations and sunspot activity.
Either take your laptop in and test drive them (explain it to the salesman, especially if they are on comission.. A fit is a sale.), find a good restocking policy, or spemd little. My D-Link card that worked came from Goodwill. It pays to look.
Anyways, I was thinking of adding one of these USB wireless accessories.. could anybody here recommend one that has a good track record of working in linux ?
I would recommend using one of the PCMCIA cards instead. Find one that uses the Anthros chipset. I picked up a D-LINK one that was recognised by Dapper Drake. I didn't need to install NDIS Wrapper of Network Manager. I don't remember the model number of the card, but setting it up was as easy as setting it up in Windows except I didn't need to use the setup CD that came with it. Dapper recognised it as an Unknown Wireless. Properties showed it has an Anthros chipset made by D-Link. From there I gave it a static IP on my LAN and plugged in the WEP key after picking my SSID from a list. I added some DNS listings and put in the gateway address of my router and I was online. There have been some difficulty with configuring many of the USB cards. Check the forums and purchase carefully.
Actually Sony licensed the technology to numerous companies, but once MP3 players appeared this made the Minidisk even less attractive, of course the MP3 player also killed off the cassette player as well.
Besides price, the copy protection was a turn-off for many. Having 2 non-interchangable format players and disks didn't help either (Data or Music). The CDR came along without Serial Copy Protection and the same disc could do Music or Data in any player/recorder except a stand alone music recorder which used Serial Copy Protection and wouldn't write to Data Discs. Needless to say, that recorder was stillborn.
Mandating restrictions on a music recorder is the kiss of death by failing to recognise the laws of commerce. The DAT suffered the same fate for the same reasons. MP3's showed how it's done without the restrictions. Now the industry is trying to put the genie back into the bottle.
In the other hand, the Memory Stick was a deciding factor in not picking a Sony when I was buying a camera...
Add to the list the format of the battery. My first digital camera was a SONY. Two lessons learned.. Interchangable parts are a must. Otherwise you are required to overstock seldom used items.
One memory card and one battery is OK for the occasional shot of the kid but useless when taking in an auto show, wedding and reception, parade, etc. Either I had a full memory with lots of useless CF cards nearby, or a dead battery with lots of NiMH and alkaline batteries nearby also useless.
I have standardised as much as possible. Everything uses either CF or SD cards and AA or AAA batteries. I have enough of both to get the job done. For a big job, the cards get pulled out of the MP3 player, the GPS and the hand held computer. A 2 week vacation to Hawaii did not mean running out of supplies. When I ran out of batteries at the cultral center, I broke open some alkaline batteries and kept shooting. I was not held hostage to a propritory battery format. It's nice that my flashlight and camera share batteries.
We're pouring so many resources into fighting them... it just strikes me that if we just tried to ignore the bastards, they'd find something better (or more profitable) to do than spam.
My inbox has been spammed to death. I open it every 6-8 weeks to delete the stuff. Eventualy when nobody has an e-mail account except spammers, the spammers will go away (to try to find you). Expect more IM spam since e-mail is dying under the load.
I love getting hot stock tips a couple months late. I look them up to see how much the pump-n-dump moved the stock. Most of the time the original delivery date has the stock at near peak and rising. The spammer is already dumping on the rise. You get in right at the time to see the peak and the sell-off on the way back down.
I tested my comcast 6 MB with and got 1.2 MB., but With speakeasy, it ranges from 8-12 download. It is obvious that they are selectively caching. [bandwidthplace.com]
Who are you connecting to? For a while, I had a 60 Meg connection at work. DSL speed tests witht the graph bar were fun to print out an post. With a speedy connection at work, I could easly find ISP's and webhosts with serious connection problems. Many things pop up like they are on my local hard drive. Other things load like dial-up. During the Napster heyday, most anything.edu was guranteed slow. (not Napster transfers, but school webpages. I never did Napster) Since those days my connection has slowed as there is more filtering at the proxy to slow things down so it's much harder to identify ISP's with slow connections.
When I first got the job, I surfed ISP websites to find an ISP with a good net connection to use from home. What good is an ISP with a speedy connection to the ISP and it's small garden when it was severely bottlenecked to the internet? I eventualy found a good local ISP with a great connection. When testing internet connections, be sure if possible to check your connection tot the ISP as well as to the Internet at large.
In short, If you are with Speakeasy, you might want to also do speed checks to the DSL Reports tests.
For venues that allow live music, which might "give public performances" (i.e. play out loud) any number of songs, the way they work it is that ASCAP/BMI offers a program where the venue can play a flat fee that allows them to play unlimited songs.
I learned the hard way (could have been a lot worse) that many theatres don't have intermission music anymore not because they can sell advertising time, but because the cost is prohibitive. I was a projectionist part time during recession of the 80's. The theatre had 2 auditoriums and played second run films. It was too small to win bids for first run features. We had no music for intermission.
I noticed the intermission input on the sound equipment and made the mistake of jacking in a walkman to make intermission nicer. The owner came unglued and let me know that a license would cost more than all of our wages combined. I almost got canned on the spot. If we were caught with intermission music without a license, they would basicaly own the theatre. After that, I understood why there is no intermission music anymore. The cost for the 20 minute breaks between films is the same as if we were a store at the mall playing music all day. Since we only had one 20 minute intermission during the week and two on weekends, per minute, it was prohibitive.
I'm glad we didn't get busted.
I don't understand the pricing where 80+ percent of bars and small venues simply can't consider hireing a band or playing background music.
Reading the regulations, A boom box is OK for an employee to bring to work. Adding speakers or a wired sound system is gonna cost you big bucks. I bet they are crying in their beer they have not taxed employees and consumers using iPods in public. MP3's has replaced wired sound in many places that used to have sound, but quit due to the fees.
There may be a legal DVD player for Linux. In most cases Linux is distributed for free with an open source license. This distribution model prevents closed source propritary applications from being bundled with the distribution.
It is now true that there is a legal DVD player. The CSS folks are so late to the table on this one, most people don't care. The un-licensed players are more consumer friendly, free, and don't make you suffer through the FBI warning.
Is the legal player free, as in cost? I have a feeling since to license players requires a fee, I would imagine the player is not free. It's probably a per installation fee. They are too late and have not met the conusmers specifications for a player.
The 2 year old in the house brings me a movie to watch. If I play it in the living room, the moment he sees the FBI warning, he knows I put on the wrong movie and hands me another.
I'm a lot like the 2 year old. I want to watch the movie now, not some boring text I've already seen many times.
If you already have a Linux installation, the legal option does not appear to be an option. I went to the CyberLink website and looked for the Linux DVD player. I didn't find it. If you can point me to it and it's price, let me know.
I've been unpleasantly surprised by Ubuntu as a desktop.
If you did your homework, you would have realized there is no legal player for DVD's. The licensing issues for MP3's generaly prevent distribution of a player for free, so install is a home project. Distributing Flash is the same.
When the dust settles and you know you have to install a DVD library, MP3 library, Flash, etc, it's not bad. In fact it's great.
Who wouldn't want a DVD player that played the movie instead of showing a warning, previews, and a menu first. I prefer to play DVD's on Linux becasue the player works for the consumer, not the DVD CSS consortium. If I want the menu, warning, or previews, I can go to them after the movie if I wish.
Do your homework and install the restricted codecs, a movie player, a DVD ripper and enjoy.
Now that PCs are expected to play DRM-protected media encoded with proprietary codecs, the window for consumer open source systems has closed.
Actualy many content providers are feeling the heat from incompatible file formats and propritory players. Nobody wants 2 dozen installs of software to play each providers content and users are limiting the number of restrictive players to only a few. The other content providers can go fly a kite! Some sites still try to get you to register and download and install their special player, but many users simply move on to a more freindly (compatible) site. This leaves most DRM content in either the Apple DRM (Quicktime and iTunes), Flash DRM, Adobe DRM, or MS DRM format. This is why places such as utube and yahoo have adopted formats that use an already established player to make their content play only, not downloadable and keepable.
Adding in Linux simply narrows the field of playback only formats that are supported simply because writing or installing yet another DRM player on yet another platform is not going to fly.
Go ask 10 non-technical people if they would consider using Linux as an OS, and 9 will look at you like you just spoke Greek to them.
I used to think most common people wouldn't recognise Ubuntu if they saw it. I started using it in public places. I get reactions from people who haven't seen it from "Is that Vista" to quite a few who go "Wow, you're using Ubuntu. Do you like it?". The fact that a few do recognise it (past the splash screen so no logo showing) is amazing. It's like people who ask how I like my Prius. (I still get a few).
I share my experiance, the waiting for Flash 9, Installing flashblock in Firefox for the obnoxious sites, and the fun getting wireless working. (with the right card, it was plug and play)
I find instead of asking them if they would consider it, simply use it in public. The curious will watch and learn that as a user, it's not hard. Those who have seen it will ask how you like it and ask about hardware compatiblity. I love telling them about installs where not a single driver disk was used in the install, unlike the old Windows install with many reboots. Even all the extra buttons on my keyboard work for volume, internet, email, etc. No drivers needed.
Newer stuff needs more hand holding such as installing the lib's for DVD's, Plays for Sure devices such as the Zen, etc. Overall, not bad.
I'm guessing the majority of the applications written to target Linux are server applications.
Open Office, Ghostscript (all in one priners are getting support), Q-Light, Gimp, Kstars, Flash 9 for Linux, Non-free codecs;-), Acidrip, Mplayer, Banchee, mtp Libraries for the Zen etc.., Myth, Astrisk, Ekiga, Bittorrent, Network Manager (Wireless support.. WooHoo), the list goes on..
If you have a Ubuntu box, when is the last time you did an update? Everytime I do an update, I see lots of evidence of programmers at work on Linux.
If everyone I know suddenly had Linux, the number of phone calls I get about computers would increase by a factor of ten, at least. I would be willing to pay the extra $50 for them to get the Vista version, since it would at least be less scary for them.
Actualy I migrated a friend from Windows to Ubuntu. The service went from trying to remove malware, failing, reinstalling, reactivating, reinstalling applications reactivating to...
"I can't get the Comcast CD to load." "My cable was out, now it tells me to run the configuration software."
Noticing the error message was from Comcast for having not picked up a new DHCP lease, I told them to forget the CD, Linux won't run the Windows program. Power down the PC and turn it back on. Problem fixed without leaving home. It's much easier to explain DHCP leases over the phone than how to remove malware.
Don't worry about the number of calls going up. It will even off as they learn the new system and learn how to configure, update, and install new features. Now they are the geek I was last year as a total noob learning the new toy.
Most step by step instructions are clear and online. It's not difficult to learn new tricks in Linux. Non-free codecs, Falshplayer 9, Firefox flashblock, and editing the hosts file are great projects to get a feel for the system.
Three years ago, I was in the hospital for several days and was denied indigent funds.
Because of that many hospitals deny expensive proceedures and instead get the patient stable and send him on. Hopefully elsewhere. Do a google search for patient dumping. They get stable and discharged, not treated and recovered.
this should have been done a long time ago, America stands out as being an extremely wealthy country but with a dire health service, having the highest infant mortality rates in the developed world, not that many countries have a truly satisfactory health service, better then nothing though.
With proper insurance, the US has some of the best healthcare in the world. It is privatised and not everyone has a paid plan. The public side for the poor is not so pretty.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone else find it strange that a /. reader was also reading Fox News?
Um, no. I look at all the points of view as do many slashdotters. Some are so out there to be laughable. Looked at any of the over unity and free energy machines lately? Reading Fox News does not mean SUCKER. It means the truth is out there and as with anything online, most of it has to be taken with a grain of salt. The tried and true shines, the false gets exposed, the true exposed as false is sometimes vindicated.
Seen the videos on the explosions in the World Trade Center? The fuel is not hot enough to melt steel is a theory. Seen the video of the gas truck fire under the overpass in California this year? That should not have been hot enough to melt steel either.
Anybody who has done any blacksmithing knows steel softens before it melts.
That failure was not from melted steel. It was from softened steel.
I like the beams cut at an angle by thermite.. Truly said by someone who hasn't used a cutting tourch and thermite. Doing a diagonal straight cut on a beam with thermite is an act of magic. Cutting a beam with a cutting torch in a straight diagonal with slag is normal.
I know, this is not the target group for this as most slashdotters have never used a cutting torch. This is why the bent truth is accepted by many. So few are in the field to know anything about working, cutting, anealing, hardening, steel to know it's properties. Someone looked up the melting point of steel and ran with the numbers assuming full strength up to the melting point. Steel is not the same as frozen water.
One looking at tire tracks from a bycycle in the sand see a close corrolation between the tracks positive one influences the other. This is much like the debate on global warming. The cause and effect can be assumed wrong even though there is a strong relationship between them. Does CO2 levels lead temprature swings? Does Temprature swings lead to a rise in CO2 levels? Just like the bike on the beach, twisting the back wheel can cause some influence of the front wheel. Burning a candle in late November gives off heat and may cause your house to overheat. The arrival of Winter or Summer may have more effect on the room temprature than lighting a candle. There is absolutely no denying a candle burning in a house puts heat, CO2 and water vapor into the house. Rning with that without checking the outside weather is foolish. Check the Mars ice caps and compare it to ours. We are burning a candle and adding heat, CO2 and Water to our atmosphere. Has anybody checked the outside season?
Next time you find tracks in the sand, notice the distance from the tangent of one wheel is fixed to the line of the other track, but the reverse is not true. The rear wheel always points to the track of the front wheel at a fixed distance. The tangent of the front wheel track does not point to the track of the rear wheel at a fixed distance. From the tracks, we can find out the direction the bicycle traveled and the distance between the front and rear wheels. Learn to look at more than the fact the two tracks are never more than 4 feet apart. Look at the whole data set for additional info.
With the additional info, and knowledge of a bycyle, If you said lets follow the tracks down the hill to see where they go. I would know enough to know if the bike indeed went down the hill or up.
From CO2 and temprature charts, not only do we see that temprature and CO2 seem to travel together, but look to see which level leads the other and by how long. From there it can be proven whether CO2 leads or Temprature leads. (Hint.. it's about a 4 year latency)
Reading Fox news and other sources is a good idea. Bad data can be culled by testing it with a few sanity checks. It requires knowledge, research, and the ability to think. Never take the news at face value.
The next time you look at the Trade Center melted steel theory, learn about heat treating steel. Here
He claims to actually do what he appears to be doing with the power of his mind.
I wonder whatever happened to the online challange from a few years back where a live webcam was locked into a safe with something else. The challange was to move things in the locked safe with the mind.
I haven't heard anything about it in years. I don't think anybody moved anything in the safe.
It is a kind of put up or shut up challange.
"So why are you wearing clothes?"
/. password, my credit card number, exp date code on the back, and SSN.
Same reason given in the article. To be prevent being taken advantage of. Same reason I don't post my
Let's face it, we have something to hide. Having nothing to hide is simply an illusion. If you have nothing to hide, post your street address, promise to not press charges and I'll gladly open your mail for you. We have pretty strong penalties for mail theft for good reason.
E-mail doesn't have the same expected protection because it transverses so many servers and routers in plaintext. It is not in a secure (paper) wrapper to prevent reading/copying/archiving so it is well known that email is a target of inspection. It's viewable with no trace unlike it's paper counterpart.
Cell phone calls are protected by law unless monitored by the government, but that is the same for your copper POTS line. In both instances, illegal taps are possible and do happen. It boils down to the risk of getting caught.
And yet you reserve time for "watching the packets" to see if anyone has pwned your network yet? Wow.
It isn't hard. It's mostly automated. If I'm out and there is a burst of traffic, it requires investigating. Some rules when violated send an alert.
Due to a few open unsecured AP's in the neighberhood, I haven't had activity in over a year. It's pretty low maitenence/low risk. It's simply easier to go elsewhere.
Take an old P2 box and install snort between your internet wired router and your wireless router and LAN. Set alerts and check it once in a while if you don't hear from it.
As far as someone pwned the network, remember, I have more than one router. It's not all on the same LAN segment. Wireless mostly goes to a gateway router and a couple networked printers. The rest of the lan is further NAT'ed. Good luck.
but I've since upgraded them to Edgy and Feisty
I've heard of several problems with the upgrade from Dapper to Edgy, so I have been avoiding that upgrade. Most of the Forums recommend a new install instead. With a new install, you need to reset most everyting and start over with non-free codecs, MTP Library for the Zen, drivers & apps for the video capture card, configuring Myth, e-mail, Flash 9, Flashblock, etc. For me the re-configure would be times 3.. My laptop, my kids desktop, and my dual boot desktop.
In the meantime, I'm enjoying the sunshine. I'll save that one for a rainy day. I'm not willing to set aside a sunny day just incase the upgrade has problems and requires more time to tweak. As a noob, many of these tasks require quite a bit of time in Google searches.
I don't buy the "safe enough" arguments. It's broken. Friends don't let friends use WEP.
Swing by and leach then. Good luck. I use more then 1 router. WEP may be weak on the wireless level.. but it's not the only level of protection.
Notice in my original post the requirement to assign a static IP, manualy assign DNS, gateway, etc. Remember I use more than 1 router. You would need to be pretty dedicated to analise the packets to properly configure a working connection without being noticed. I watch the packets also.
However I am running Kubuntu Feisty. Maybe it's time for an upgrade?
Probably true. I'm running Dapper because I have a life. I spend little time as a noob putzing with it. I'm more of an end user. I settled on Dapper because it is the LTS version so I wouldn't have to be on the 6 month upgrade cycle.
Anyway, in a couple years, I'll upgrade. In the meantime I'll enjoy the sunshine and warm weather, camping, etc. When rainy weather sets in and I have time to blow my install and learn how to recover it, I'll ditz with it.
In the meantime, I have a date with a jetski.
Non-rechargeable alkalines are wasteful and damaging to the environment. You were of course speaking of rechargeable Ni or Li batteries right?
Um no. Spending $50 for 4 extra sets of batteries that will rot in a drawer is a waste of resources. The extra batteries is for when you run completely through your regular stock of rechargable batteries on a high demand job.
Having an overly large stock of rechargable batteries is a total waste. You toss them into a charger and when needed you find the set of 4 doesn't work because one died 6 months ago and you didn't catch it. In the field you miss the shot trying to sort out the dud and finding a working replacement.. Not a good idea. I work with a smaller pool of batteries that get regularly rotated, tested and known to work well. Even single cells are in the rotation. I feed them to my MP3 player. When on a shoot, I can depend on them. When a surge in demand exceeds my supply of charged cells, regular disposable batteries is better than being dead in the water. Even these if not used can be used in low current applications such as the clocks arround the house, pagers, TV/VCR remotes, standby flashlight by the electrical panel, and other items rechargable batteries are poorly suited for due to their self discharge. A secondary stock of regular batteries is cheap, pretty foolproof, and can be easly adjusted to match the anticipated job in a pinch.
A 36 pack of AA's at Costco is under $15. It's cheap insurance for a long shoot. Having that many NiMH cells is a total waste of money.
As I stated before, my trip to Hawaii used quite a few alkaline batteries. Since then, I haven't needed any in several years. I got my shots. I don't have a large surplus of NiMH batteries expirieng.
At work they recycle all types.. Li, Carbon-Zinc, Alkaline, coin Lithium, NiMH and Lead Acid.
I thought you were onto something until I realized you might not be running Linux over wireless by this statement;
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Everybody knows WEP is a waste of time. If you really want your wireless to be secure, just wrap the access point in a HEPA filter, but make sure you cover your laptop with the exact same grade of filter, to ensure compatibility. THAT will keep the undesirables out (assuming they are larger than
Have you had any luck using WPA on an older distro such as Dapper? I set up to get connected. I live on the end of a road and have brick exterior so signal offsite is wimpy. Not too many wardrivers find me and there are lots of unsecured points nearby so I'm not a high profile target.
It's like being in the jungle with a companion and being attacked by a lion. I don't have to outrun the lion. I just have to run faster than my companion.
Just checking this google page summs it up.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Linux+and+WP
I started with the basics to get a working connection. I can try to add WPA later, but enough have had problems.
How did you know I work in a cleanroom?
I would like to see the break down of what costs so fscking much.
Field test data. Have you priced a 2 week field test run lately?
The purchasing part is hard to do when the same model comes with a different chipset each day, depending on constellations and sunspot activity.
Either take your laptop in and test drive them (explain it to the salesman, especially if they are on comission.. A fit is a sale.), find a good restocking policy, or spemd little. My D-Link card that worked came from Goodwill. It pays to look.
Anyways, I was thinking of adding one of these USB wireless accessories.. could anybody here recommend one that has a good track record of working in linux ?
I would recommend using one of the PCMCIA cards instead. Find one that uses the Anthros chipset. I picked up a D-LINK one that was recognised by Dapper Drake. I didn't need to install NDIS Wrapper of Network Manager. I don't remember the model number of the card, but setting it up was as easy as setting it up in Windows except I didn't need to use the setup CD that came with it. Dapper recognised it as an Unknown Wireless. Properties showed it has an Anthros chipset made by D-Link. From there I gave it a static IP on my LAN and plugged in the WEP key after picking my SSID from a list. I added some DNS listings and put in the gateway address of my router and I was online. There have been some difficulty with configuring many of the USB cards. Check the forums and purchase carefully.
Actually Sony licensed the technology to numerous companies, but once MP3 players appeared this made the Minidisk even less attractive, of course the MP3 player also killed off the cassette player as well.
Besides price, the copy protection was a turn-off for many. Having 2 non-interchangable format players and disks didn't help either (Data or Music). The CDR came along without Serial Copy Protection and the same disc could do Music or Data in any player/recorder except a stand alone music recorder which used Serial Copy Protection and wouldn't write to Data Discs. Needless to say, that recorder was stillborn.
Mandating restrictions on a music recorder is the kiss of death by failing to recognise the laws of commerce. The DAT suffered the same fate for the same reasons. MP3's showed how it's done without the restrictions. Now the industry is trying to put the genie back into the bottle.
In the other hand, the Memory Stick was a deciding factor in not picking a Sony when I was buying a camera...
Add to the list the format of the battery. My first digital camera was a SONY. Two lessons learned.. Interchangable parts are a must. Otherwise you are required to overstock seldom used items.
One memory card and one battery is OK for the occasional shot of the kid but useless when taking in an auto show, wedding and reception, parade, etc. Either I had a full memory with lots of useless CF cards nearby, or a dead battery with lots of NiMH and alkaline batteries nearby also useless.
I have standardised as much as possible. Everything uses either CF or SD cards and AA or AAA batteries. I have enough of both to get the job done. For a big job, the cards get pulled out of the MP3 player, the GPS and the hand held computer. A 2 week vacation to Hawaii did not mean running out of supplies. When I ran out of batteries at the cultral center, I broke open some alkaline batteries and kept shooting. I was not held hostage to a propritory battery format. It's nice that my flashlight and camera share batteries.
We're pouring so many resources into fighting them... it just strikes me that if we just tried to ignore the bastards, they'd find something better (or more profitable) to do than spam.
My inbox has been spammed to death. I open it every 6-8 weeks to delete the stuff. Eventualy when nobody has an e-mail account except spammers, the spammers will go away (to try to find you). Expect more IM spam since e-mail is dying under the load.
I love getting hot stock tips a couple months late. I look them up to see how much the pump-n-dump moved the stock. Most of the time the original delivery date has the stock at near peak and rising. The spammer is already dumping on the rise. You get in right at the time to see the peak and the sell-off on the way back down.
Maybe not.
.edu was guranteed slow. (not Napster transfers, but school webpages. I never did Napster) Since those days my connection has slowed as there is more filtering at the proxy to slow things down so it's much harder to identify ISP's with slow connections.
I tested my comcast 6 MB with and got 1.2 MB., but With speakeasy, it ranges from 8-12 download. It is obvious that they are selectively caching. [bandwidthplace.com]
Who are you connecting to? For a while, I had a 60 Meg connection at work. DSL speed tests witht the graph bar were fun to print out an post. With a speedy connection at work, I could easly find ISP's and webhosts with serious connection problems. Many things pop up like they are on my local hard drive. Other things load like dial-up. During the Napster heyday, most anything
When I first got the job, I surfed ISP websites to find an ISP with a good net connection to use from home. What good is an ISP with a speedy connection to the ISP and it's small garden when it was severely bottlenecked to the internet? I eventualy found a good local ISP with a great connection. When testing internet connections, be sure if possible to check your connection tot the ISP as well as to the Internet at large.
In short, If you are with Speakeasy, you might want to also do speed checks to the DSL Reports tests.
For venues that allow live music, which might "give public performances" (i.e. play out loud) any number of songs, the way they work it is that ASCAP/BMI offers a program where the venue can play a flat fee that allows them to play unlimited songs.
I learned the hard way (could have been a lot worse) that many theatres don't have intermission music anymore not because they can sell advertising time, but because the cost is prohibitive. I was a projectionist part time during recession of the 80's. The theatre had 2 auditoriums and played second run films. It was too small to win bids for first run features. We had no music for intermission.
I noticed the intermission input on the sound equipment and made the mistake of jacking in a walkman to make intermission nicer. The owner came unglued and let me know that a license would cost more than all of our wages combined. I almost got canned on the spot. If we were caught with intermission music without a license, they would basicaly own the theatre. After that, I understood why there is no intermission music anymore. The cost for the 20 minute breaks between films is the same as if we were a store at the mall playing music all day. Since we only had one 20 minute intermission during the week and two on weekends, per minute, it was prohibitive.
I'm glad we didn't get busted.
I don't understand the pricing where 80+ percent of bars and small venues simply can't consider hireing a band or playing background music.
Reading the regulations, A boom box is OK for an employee to bring to work. Adding speakers or a wired sound system is gonna cost you big bucks. I bet they are crying in their beer they have not taxed employees and consumers using iPods in public. MP3's has replaced wired sound in many places that used to have sound, but quit due to the fees.
There may be a legal DVD player for Linux. In most cases Linux is distributed for free with an open source license. This distribution model prevents closed source propritary applications from being bundled with the distribution.
It is now true that there is a legal DVD player. The CSS folks are so late to the table on this one, most people don't care. The un-licensed players are more consumer friendly, free, and don't make you suffer through the FBI warning.
Is the legal player free, as in cost? I have a feeling since to license players requires a fee, I would imagine the player is not free. It's probably a per installation fee. They are too late and have not met the conusmers specifications for a player.
The 2 year old in the house brings me a movie to watch. If I play it in the living room, the moment he sees the FBI warning, he knows I put on the wrong movie and hands me another.
I'm a lot like the 2 year old. I want to watch the movie now, not some boring text I've already seen many times.
If you already have a Linux installation, the legal option does not appear to be an option. I went to the CyberLink website and looked for the Linux DVD player. I didn't find it. If you can point me to it and it's price, let me know.
http://www.cyberlink.com/
Getting legal DVD playback is still a problem.
I've been unpleasantly surprised by Ubuntu as a desktop.
If you did your homework, you would have realized there is no legal player for DVD's. The licensing issues for MP3's generaly prevent distribution of a player for free, so install is a home project. Distributing Flash is the same.
When the dust settles and you know you have to install a DVD library, MP3 library, Flash, etc, it's not bad. In fact it's great.
Who wouldn't want a DVD player that played the movie instead of showing a warning, previews, and a menu first. I prefer to play DVD's on Linux becasue the player works for the consumer, not the DVD CSS consortium. If I want the menu, warning, or previews, I can go to them after the movie if I wish.
Do your homework and install the restricted codecs, a movie player, a DVD ripper and enjoy.
Now that PCs are expected to play DRM-protected media encoded with proprietary codecs, the window for consumer open source systems has closed.
Actualy many content providers are feeling the heat from incompatible file formats and propritory players. Nobody wants 2 dozen installs of software to play each providers content and users are limiting the number of restrictive players to only a few. The other content providers can go fly a kite! Some sites still try to get you to register and download and install their special player, but many users simply move on to a more freindly (compatible) site. This leaves most DRM content in either the Apple DRM (Quicktime and iTunes), Flash DRM, Adobe DRM, or MS DRM format. This is why places such as utube and yahoo have adopted formats that use an already established player to make their content play only, not downloadable and keepable.
Adding in Linux simply narrows the field of playback only formats that are supported simply because writing or installing yet another DRM player on yet another platform is not going to fly.
Go ask 10 non-technical people if they would consider using Linux as an OS, and 9 will look at you like you just spoke Greek to them.
I used to think most common people wouldn't recognise Ubuntu if they saw it. I started using it in public places. I get reactions from people who haven't seen it from "Is that Vista" to quite a few who go "Wow, you're using Ubuntu. Do you like it?". The fact that a few do recognise it (past the splash screen so no logo showing) is amazing. It's like people who ask how I like my Prius. (I still get a few).
I share my experiance, the waiting for Flash 9, Installing flashblock in Firefox for the obnoxious sites, and the fun getting wireless working. (with the right card, it was plug and play)
I find instead of asking them if they would consider it, simply use it in public. The curious will watch and learn that as a user, it's not hard. Those who have seen it will ask how you like it and ask about hardware compatiblity. I love telling them about installs where not a single driver disk was used in the install, unlike the old Windows install with many reboots. Even all the extra buttons on my keyboard work for volume, internet, email, etc. No drivers needed.
Newer stuff needs more hand holding such as installing the lib's for DVD's, Plays for Sure devices such as the Zen, etc. Overall, not bad.
I'm guessing the majority of the applications written to target Linux are server applications.
;-), Acidrip, Mplayer, Banchee, mtp Libraries for the Zen etc.., Myth, Astrisk, Ekiga, Bittorrent, Network Manager (Wireless support.. WooHoo), the list goes on..
Open Office, Ghostscript (all in one priners are getting support), Q-Light, Gimp, Kstars, Flash 9 for Linux, Non-free codecs
If you have a Ubuntu box, when is the last time you did an update? Everytime I do an update, I see lots of evidence of programmers at work on Linux.
If everyone I know suddenly had Linux, the number of phone calls I get about computers would increase by a factor of ten, at least. I would be willing to pay the extra $50 for them to get the Vista version, since it would at least be less scary for them.
Actualy I migrated a friend from Windows to Ubuntu. The service went from trying to remove malware, failing, reinstalling, reactivating, reinstalling applications reactivating to...
"I can't get the Comcast CD to load." "My cable was out, now it tells me to run the configuration software."
Noticing the error message was from Comcast for having not picked up a new DHCP lease, I told them to forget the CD, Linux won't run the Windows program. Power down the PC and turn it back on. Problem fixed without leaving home. It's much easier to explain DHCP leases over the phone than how to remove malware.
Don't worry about the number of calls going up. It will even off as they learn the new system and learn how to configure, update, and install new features. Now they are the geek I was last year as a total noob learning the new toy.
Most step by step instructions are clear and online. It's not difficult to learn new tricks in Linux. Non-free codecs, Falshplayer 9, Firefox flashblock, and editing the hosts file are great projects to get a feel for the system.
Three years ago, I was in the hospital for several days and was denied indigent funds.
Because of that many hospitals deny expensive proceedures and instead get the patient stable and send him on. Hopefully elsewhere. Do a google search for patient dumping. They get stable and discharged, not treated and recovered.
this should have been done a long time ago, America stands out as being an extremely wealthy country but with a dire health service, having the highest infant mortality rates in the developed world, not that many countries have a truly satisfactory health service, better then nothing though.
With proper insurance, the US has some of the best healthcare in the world. It is privatised and not everyone has a paid plan. The public side for the poor is not so pretty.