But even that self-professed credential is suspect. If you can't configure a Windoze box to resist attack for four minutes, you're no power user. Indeed, you have no business even plugging one into the fucking wall.
Mom and pop who buy a peecee at Walmart won't know what they're plugging into the wall. PCs are sold as toasters; you don't need to know what's inside.
The problem you're rather casually glossing over is how secure a system is OUT OF THE BOX - anyone who can patch and update Windows faster than it takes to get it zapped on the Net either has a 32MB pipe or has been smart enough to use another system to get some good starting (non-MS) code like ZoneAlarm so that they buy at least enough time, assuming they can stop all the other 'freebies' from going online and opening the box even further (MSN messenger comes to mind).
There is absolutely NO excuse - of any company on the planet, MS has about the best resources available to sort the problem and has had some of those for over two decades. But they never bothered, choosing instead of widening the "other lemmings use it" cult that makes people buy Windows.
Sorry, bad pun, but I was wondering why this wasn't left to go to court with all the associated expenses? Would have been much more effective in bad press value if they'd turn up in court to find a picture of a gravestone...
Have a look here. It's made by people having the same problems as you (although I personally think you failed to start with the right platform) and they just went ahead and created their own.
Now imagine something that Windows doesn't support (like working in a reliable fashion, but I digress) - you'd be stuck.
I guess the real problem you're highlighting is that you still need to do a bit of upfront research, and that I'd agree with. Getting a HP PCS range printer to work on SuSE 9.2 Pro is still pretty crap, for instance (you have to avoid the normal installer),
The great challenge from book to movie is to give those who have already read the book something that is at least not entirely at odds with the picture they have formed in their heads. It's very hard, but not impossible despite a abundant absence of mind readers;-). And some of the SFX they come up with help a lot.
In a way, this is also a reason why black and white pictures tend to have more 'feel' depth than coloured ones - it gives the mind something to do.
There are many more examples where leaving the brain something to do enhances the experience (sorry, marketing word;-) like sensual vs sexual (which lies mostly in the amount of exposed skin;) etc etc.
I am in awe of movie makers that can adapt a book and stay true to the content - as I said, it's very hard work..
I mean, what's wrong with a little bit of deception? For good measure you could think about using Fred Cohen's Deception Toolkit (DTK) on the firewall adjacent and make it look like a really attractively leaky box. Add a LaBrea tarpit as secondary MX and you're ready to make friends.
You may want to take a closer look at the Power architecture. The key RISC problem was serialisation of input (i.e. a bottleneck), and IBM has found a rather neat way round it, hence the stunning latest benchmarks.
You may be right long term, but it has always struck me as a rather risky strategy to throw out the old before you have the new stuff well and truly debugged. Even Sun was betting on this chip - they abandoned RISC years ago, probably because of the above problem that IBM solved.
All of this has left IBM a nice, wide open barn door to the market. And they supply good kit, so I personally think the long term damage done by Intel to all that depend on them is not exactly small..
I've come off the 'must have latest gadget' train quite a while back. When it comes to PDAs, my Clie NX70 is doing OK, but is miles from perfect. What I'm waiting for is something like the new XDA IIs, but with sliding keyboard (they removed that for some bizarre reason) and 3G and 4 band capability.
One box to do it all, and I'll suffer the fact that it's Windows because it does what I need it to do (as long as it talks to my Linux systems at home as well as to my Windows company laptop or it'll never make it into my hands;-).
If anyone remembers the Organiser II and the Psion 3/3a/Revo/5/5MX range after that, they all had two extremely redeeming feature: a very simple database facility (flatfile), and a easy to use language called OPL (Organiser Programming Language) which was a cross between Pascal and BASIC.
It wasn't perfect, but just having a simple language and a simple flatfile DB facility turned it from a gadget into a genuinely usable piece of kit. The language acquired GUI facilities when it moved to 16bit platforms like Psion Revo and 5MX etc, but the fundamentals of a flatfile layout remained. Nt ideal, but for a portable device it was very useful because the average end user could create a new DB without any programming knowledge, and without having to fork out extra cash.
Oh, and having the hardware diagrams meant I could develop some interfaces as well for the Org II - it was quite fun to hook it up to things like digital calipers and torque wrenches. It just depends on what you call fun;-).
As for durability - someone I know is still using an Organiser II..
Getting back to where I started - I think I'm at least half a year away from seeing my 'ideal' PDA on the market. And I'm sure that a better one will appear the moment I buy it;-)
That's the whole idea behing greylisting - log and soft reject the first time ("too busy" signal), pass the second time. However, there are 2 problems with that:
1) with the amount of zombies out there it's not going to be that hard coding in a retransmit. 2) a really intelligent trojan will look for the connected ISP mail relay. As the data is coming from the inside it's be allowed until the ISP spots the flood and bars or throttles it.
First off, there is a balance between the right to privacy and the right to know.
Secondly, hasn't it occurred to anyone that SCO has been asking for an awful lot of company confidential material from IBM? With "awful lot" I mean to the point of being rediculous and apparently completely irrelevant to the case itself.
Given the ease by which bits of confidential information appears to make it into the public (like the reading out of IBM data in court despite a judge's order to stop it) I would, as IBM, feel rather concerned - these are, after all, their business secrets. And sorry, you *don't* have a right to know those. Otherwise go and ask Microsoft for the same, they're in court more often AFAIK.
I agree you/me/planet ought to have full access to court proceedings, but I think SCO is demonstrating quite clearly how this can potentially be abused. Given the origin of some of their financial backing I guess it's imported expertise.
Now, back to the journo, I have no idea what her motive is, but I remain unconvinced this has anything to do with real journalism.
In the interest of balance I would like to point out that Microsoft alleges they were not allowed to speak at the FLOSSPOLS conference. I think that was a tactical mistake - they should have been first to speak. The rest of the conference would have disproved any creative interpretation of the facts.
It would have added a lot of power to the proceedings.
Clamping down on IP/port only initially limits the vendor. Once they're on their box they can use that as a staging post.
You may not believe this (neither did I when I discovered it) but we actually had vendors using their test system to hop onto the production set where we had just put ACLs in. They got rather upset when we downed the box as soon as the IDS went off (we had calls from the vendor making statements like "unable to support, sadly unable to meet Service Level Agreements etc", you know the drill). I guess they got even more upset when legal started to highlight to their MD the relevant contract clauses and which criminal laws they had broken in the process.
Sometimes a clue can only be brought by brute force - they had something like 3 months warning we were going to tighten up..
Time I start playing with LaBrea tarpits - however much I like nmap I like the idea of nmap fly paper in the network better;-).
I'm not IT support, and frankly, I wouldn't want to be if it involved Windows. I personally think you cannot blame the user other than when they've done something you have explicitly told them not to, or when it's really just blatantly stupid what they've done.
First of all, users are typically not trained when given a system because "it's so easy to use you don't need training" (that cuddly nice Windows myth). That might be so, but telling them about backups and deleting files strikes me as a healthy idea.
Secondly, you should not expect a user to become a car mechanic to run a car. Why does a user have to maintain AV and patches, do spyware checks, defrag their harddisk and watch what every website downloads on to their system? Instead of enjoying the richness of knowledge of the Net it's turned for them into an avenue of fear for which they happily spend serious money to buy a sense of safety. Maybe that was the whole idea..
Thirdly, it's IMO utterly absurd that you can't expect a computer system to run cleanly without forever rebooting and patching the box. I've had a couple of people comment after trying Linux for a couple of months that the thing they enjoyed most was simply that it worked. Yes, it patches too, but at least it does it cleanly (nothing breaks) and the patches tend to keep at least pace with discoveries and disclosures instead of being late (in some cases months) or being met with dire warnings that you should upgrade (read: spend more money because the PROVIDER made a hash of it).
I think Windows is userfriendly, but only in the usability aspect of it. If MS was clever enough to actually focus on the usability aspects they could indeed make a fortune, even with Windows. At the moment it appears that the only way they can hang on to the empire is by buying their way out, marketing and legal. They can do *much* better with the people they have. Take, for example, their DNS setup facility. There is nothing in Linux distros I've come across that is so simple and elegant to set up, even with more basic skills. Now *THAT* I consider useful. Not this "I have more features than you" stuff that is of no benefit to anyone.
I've given up supporting anyone using Windows except for my parents, whose machine I have remote control over via UltraVNC and SSH (and only when I ask them to load it up - ZoneAlarm has to be given explicit permission to allow it through).
These days, working on a Windows problem is a bit like doing emergency heart surgery in a disease ridden hospital: you know you don't have a choice, but you know there will be more problems to come. And the patient may still die despite your best efforts (with costs like private healthcare;-), and guess who gets the blame then.
I have better things to do with my time. I've converted a few people to Linux by letting them play with Knoppix for a while. When they felt comfortable enough I've switched them over, and the only ones that have ever had a problem with that were gamers. Fix that and there's no real reason to run MS anymore. It's unsafe, unstable and/way/ too expensive.
As far as I can see this guy appears to be seriously abusing the minorities aspect of the hate crime laws, but AFAIK there's only so often you can waste FBI resources before they want a small chat with you, in a nice room with little in the way of comfortable furniture.
I mean, some of the hate crime work is really serious, what this guy is doing is almost insulting..
And, (AFAIK, IANAL) isn't it illegal to repeatedly threaten legal action without following it up?
First off, I'm a SuSE USer, and have been since v6.4. My problem is that I have very little time to fiddle around, with SuSE (just upgraded to 9.2) is really easy to hand to someone else, insert DVD, point & click. So, even with teh absolute beginner it's not scary.
Having said that. I myself occasionally stray and do a complete rip-n-replace of my workstation (when I finally find the time), and Gentoo is next on my list (which also features Debian and Slackware - going full circle as I started long ago with Slack on floppies;-).
What I recommend to others should be what suits them, not what my preferences dictate. But I've given up on RedHat. Maybe Fedora, but for my friends (and that includes business) RH is not worth recommending if you've ever used SuSE.
And yeah, support is ESSENTIAL - communities are IMO *good* things even though it's for some a culture shock;-)
You're right in that Mark could possibly do that, but consider it a generic question, and there's much need for charity work than even Mark could possibly fund (another reason for the community driven approach).
There are more projects "out there" that could do with help, and not (for instance) every charity has spare cash - or is even seen by a Government as sexy enough to fund, especially if it's for a minority). In some cases it's a matter of just giving charities some more affordable advice - the usual suspect have there too been busy selling 'the habit' that they now need to kick in order to keep their money for their original charitable goals..
I have to declare an interest here, I've just picked up 5 old PCs from a bank in central London which will be used to set up the IT for a very small school (3 classrooms, all volunteers, funded entirely by donations - and all NOT in English) - after, of course, mil spec datawiping of the hard disks;-). I'm doing this with the help of some friends and we'll rather chip in than ask for money - about the only cost we have is an ADSL pipe;-)
Both sites are probably built from the same popular Content Management System Geeklog". You can play with a number of them at OpenSource CMS.
You are affected by reading too much RIAA, SCO and Microsoft coverage: not everything looking similar is theft or ripoff;-).
It's a primitive heat collector
on
Solar Shingles
·
· Score: 1
The idea is that the water in the hose heats up, but a hose offers quite a high resistance to flow so you typically need a pump to keep it circulating. You store the heated water in a tank from where you loop it through the hose again, and it'll get warmer and warmer.
A better solution you'll find in practically any house in Cyprus: they typically buffer drinking water on top of the house (for levelling pressure and demand), and you'll see a secondary tank fed below that which also includes a loop into a solar heater array (typically a metal box with metal pipes, blackened and covered with glass). The piping used is so wide that the natural rise of warm water creates the required circulation so you have seriously hot wat water after a while for virtually no running costs or maintenance.
I used that same principle to build one while I was in Thailand (I got bored one day;-). The heat there is so massive that even with huge inefficencies you still have to ensure the system can vent - if it works too well you can end up with steam which tends to be a mildly unpopular option for showers;-)
Hi Mark, as with any (F)OSS project you're almost entirely depending on volunteers. That's OK for popular projects, but to work on, say, an admin or accounting back-end someone still needs to do the heavy lifting without the promise of the kind of glamour and street cred that the likes of Firefox offer.
Have you found a way to get support for the less sexy projects and if so, how?
Given the potential for covert surveillance and the almost uncontrolled assault on pricavy that's taking place with "9/11" as excuse, what do you reckon the chances are you get a/short/ range RFID in that passport?
You don't appear to realise that an RFID is readable over quite a distance (spec says 30 feet or so, but double that distance has been tested).
Suitably equipped you could pick a US passport carrier out of a crowd - IMO a very unhealthy idea. A barcode, OK. RFID or similar broadcasting device, not OK.
I find that a somewhat strange statement. Are you really sure there's no-one in Russia contributing to (F)OSS? Given the quality of coders they have there (hardcore trained because they had to reverse engineer everything - cool stimulation through US embargos, btw) that would rather surprise me.
The nice thing about UltraVNC is that it has a chat and file transfer facility built in, which is extremely helpful when helping someone on remote, and with the video driver even dialup is useful. I wish it had a Linux counterpart that would take those extra facilities.
As for Linux use, any of them will do. I've tried VNC from Win to Linux and vice versa, and have used x2x, win2vnc and x2vnc as well (a must try if you have a desktop AND laptop;-).
Now, if we could only get that middle mouse button to work...
Slashdot Mirror
Mom and pop who buy a peecee at Walmart won't know what they're plugging into the wall. PCs are sold as toasters; you don't need to know what's inside.
The problem you're rather casually glossing over is how secure a system is OUT OF THE BOX - anyone who can patch and update Windows faster than it takes to get it zapped on the Net either has a 32MB pipe or has been smart enough to use another system to get some good starting (non-MS) code like ZoneAlarm so that they buy at least enough time, assuming they can stop all the other 'freebies' from going online and opening the box even further (MSN messenger comes to mind).
There is absolutely NO excuse - of any company on the planet, MS has about the best resources available to sort the problem and has had some of those for over two decades. But they never bothered, choosing instead of widening the "other lemmings use it" cult that makes people buy Windows.
It's not to hard grasp why, though.
Would you otherwise buy an upgrade?
Sorry, bad pun, but I was wondering why this wasn't left to go to court with all the associated expenses? Would have been much more effective in bad press value if they'd turn up in court to find a picture of a gravestone...
Have a look here. It's made by people having the same problems as you (although I personally think you failed to start with the right platform) and they just went ahead and created their own.
Now imagine something that Windows doesn't support (like working in a reliable fashion, but I digress) - you'd be stuck.
I guess the real problem you're highlighting is that you still need to do a bit of upfront research, and that I'd agree with. Getting a HP PCS range printer to work on SuSE 9.2 Pro is still pretty crap, for instance (you have to avoid the normal installer),
The great challenge from book to movie is to give those who have already read the book something that is at least not entirely at odds with the picture they have formed in their heads. It's very hard, but not impossible despite a abundant absence of mind readers ;-). And some of the SFX they come up with help a lot.
;-) like sensual vs sexual (which lies mostly in the amount of exposed skin ;) etc etc.
In a way, this is also a reason why black and white pictures tend to have more 'feel' depth than coloured ones - it gives the mind something to do.
There are many more examples where leaving the brain something to do enhances the experience (sorry, marketing word
I am in awe of movie makers that can adapt a book and stay true to the content - as I said, it's very hard work..
I mean, what's wrong with a little bit of deception? For good measure you could think about using Fred Cohen's Deception Toolkit (DTK) on the firewall adjacent and make it look like a really attractively leaky box. Add a LaBrea tarpit as secondary MX and you're ready to make friends.
.
Yeah, I know. I didn't bother either
= Ch =
You may want to take a closer look at the Power architecture. The key RISC problem was serialisation of input (i.e. a bottleneck), and IBM has found a rather neat way round it, hence the stunning latest benchmarks.
You may be right long term, but it has always struck me as a rather risky strategy to throw out the old before you have the new stuff well and truly debugged. Even Sun was betting on this chip - they abandoned RISC years ago, probably because of the above problem that IBM solved.
All of this has left IBM a nice, wide open barn door to the market. And they supply good kit, so I personally think the long term damage done by Intel to all that depend on them is not exactly small..
I received nil advance notification, which is a bit disappointing.
However, the ad is impressive although I agree with another poster that spreading it over days would have ensured more prolonged coverage.
Well done!
I've come off the 'must have latest gadget' train quite a while back. When it comes to PDAs, my Clie NX70 is doing OK, but is miles from perfect. What I'm waiting for is something like the new XDA IIs, but with sliding keyboard (they removed that for some bizarre reason) and 3G and 4 band capability.
;-).
;-).
;-)
One box to do it all, and I'll suffer the fact that it's Windows because it does what I need it to do (as long as it talks to my Linux systems at home as well as to my Windows company laptop or it'll never make it into my hands
If anyone remembers the Organiser II and the Psion 3/3a/Revo/5/5MX range after that, they all had two extremely redeeming feature: a very simple database facility (flatfile), and a easy to use language called OPL (Organiser Programming Language) which was a cross between Pascal and BASIC.
It wasn't perfect, but just having a simple language and a simple flatfile DB facility turned it from a gadget into a genuinely usable piece of kit. The language acquired GUI facilities when it moved to 16bit platforms like Psion Revo and 5MX etc, but the fundamentals of a flatfile layout remained. Nt ideal, but for a portable device it was very useful because the average end user could create a new DB without any programming knowledge, and without having to fork out extra cash.
Oh, and having the hardware diagrams meant I could develop some interfaces as well for the Org II - it was quite fun to hook it up to things like digital calipers and torque wrenches. It just depends on what you call fun
As for durability - someone I know is still using an Organiser II..
Getting back to where I started - I think I'm at least half a year away from seeing my 'ideal' PDA on the market. And I'm sure that a better one will appear the moment I buy it
= Ch =
That's the whole idea behing greylisting - log and soft reject the first time ("too busy" signal), pass the second time. However, there are 2 problems with that:
1) with the amount of zombies out there it's not going to be that hard coding in a retransmit.
2) a really intelligent trojan will look for the connected ISP mail relay. As the data is coming from the inside it's be allowed until the ISP spots the flood and bars or throttles it.
In either case your greylisting is history.
First off, there is a balance between the right to privacy and the right to know.
Secondly, hasn't it occurred to anyone that SCO has been asking for an awful lot of company confidential material from IBM? With "awful lot" I mean to the point of being rediculous and apparently completely irrelevant to the case itself.
Given the ease by which bits of confidential information appears to make it into the public (like the reading out of IBM data in court despite a judge's order to stop it) I would, as IBM, feel rather concerned - these are, after all, their business secrets. And sorry, you *don't* have a right to know those. Otherwise go and ask Microsoft for the same, they're in court more often AFAIK.
I agree you/me/planet ought to have full access to court proceedings, but I think SCO is demonstrating quite clearly how this can potentially be abused. Given the origin of some of their financial backing I guess it's imported expertise.
Now, back to the journo, I have no idea what her motive is, but I remain unconvinced this has anything to do with real journalism.
Disclaimer: all of this IMHO, and IANAL etc..
In the interest of balance I would like to point out that Microsoft alleges they were not allowed to speak at the FLOSSPOLS conference. I think that was a tactical mistake - they should have been first to speak. The rest of the conference would have disproved any creative interpretation of the facts.
It would have added a lot of power to the proceedings.
Clamping down on IP/port only initially limits the vendor. Once they're on their box they can use that as a staging post.
;-).
You may not believe this (neither did I when I discovered it) but we actually had vendors using their test system to hop onto the production set where we had just put ACLs in. They got rather upset when we downed the box as soon as the IDS went off (we had calls from the vendor making statements like "unable to support, sadly unable to meet Service Level Agreements etc", you know the drill). I guess they got even more upset when legal started to highlight to their MD the relevant contract clauses and which criminal laws they had broken in the process.
Sometimes a clue can only be brought by brute force - they had something like 3 months warning we were going to tighten up..
Time I start playing with LaBrea tarpits - however much I like nmap I like the idea of nmap fly paper in the network better
I'm not IT support, and frankly, I wouldn't want to be if it involved Windows. I personally think you cannot blame the user other than when they've done something you have explicitly told them not to, or when it's really just blatantly stupid what they've done.
;-)
First of all, users are typically not trained when given a system because "it's so easy to use you don't need training" (that cuddly nice Windows myth). That might be so, but telling them about backups and deleting files strikes me as a healthy idea.
Secondly, you should not expect a user to become a car mechanic to run a car. Why does a user have to maintain AV and patches, do spyware checks, defrag their harddisk and watch what every website downloads on to their system? Instead of enjoying the richness of knowledge of the Net it's turned for them into an avenue of fear for which they happily spend serious money to buy a sense of safety. Maybe that was the whole idea..
Thirdly, it's IMO utterly absurd that you can't expect a computer system to run cleanly without forever rebooting and patching the box. I've had a couple of people comment after trying Linux for a couple of months that the thing they enjoyed most was simply that it worked. Yes, it patches too, but at least it does it cleanly (nothing breaks) and the patches tend to keep at least pace with discoveries and disclosures instead of being late (in some cases months) or being met with dire warnings that you should upgrade (read: spend more money because the PROVIDER made a hash of it).
I think Windows is userfriendly, but only in the usability aspect of it. If MS was clever enough to actually focus on the usability aspects they could indeed make a fortune, even with Windows. At the moment it appears that the only way they can hang on to the empire is by buying their way out, marketing and legal. They can do *much* better with the people they have. Take, for example, their DNS setup facility. There is nothing in Linux distros I've come across that is so simple and elegant to set up, even with more basic skills. Now *THAT* I consider useful. Not this "I have more features than you" stuff that is of no benefit to anyone.
So there. I'll shut up now
At least my parents listen ;-)
;-), and guess who gets the blame then.
/way/ too expensive.
I've given up supporting anyone using Windows except for my parents, whose machine I have remote control over via UltraVNC and SSH (and only when I ask them to load it up - ZoneAlarm has to be given explicit permission to allow it through).
These days, working on a Windows problem is a bit like doing emergency heart surgery in a disease ridden hospital: you know you don't have a choice, but you know there will be more problems to come. And the patient may still die despite your best efforts (with costs like private healthcare
I have better things to do with my time. I've converted a few people to Linux by letting them play with Knoppix for a while. When they felt comfortable enough I've switched them over, and the only ones that have ever had a problem with that were gamers. Fix that and there's no real reason to run MS anymore. It's unsafe, unstable and
You definitely *need* a monopoly to sell it..
Ah, this is getting interesting. Define a habitat for a SCO fan ;-).
As far as I can see this guy appears to be seriously abusing the minorities aspect of the hate crime laws, but AFAIK there's only so often you can waste FBI resources before they want a small chat with you, in a nice room with little in the way of comfortable furniture.
..
I mean, some of the hate crime work is really serious, what this guy is doing is almost insulting..
And, (AFAIK, IANAL) isn't it illegal to repeatedly threaten legal action without following it up?
Just musing
First off, I'm a SuSE USer, and have been since v6.4. My problem is that I have very little time to fiddle around, with SuSE (just upgraded to 9.2) is really easy to hand to someone else, insert DVD, point & click. So, even with teh absolute beginner it's not scary.
;-).
;-)
Having said that. I myself occasionally stray and do a complete rip-n-replace of my workstation (when I finally find the time), and Gentoo is next on my list (which also features Debian and Slackware - going full circle as I started long ago with Slack on floppies
What I recommend to others should be what suits them, not what my preferences dictate. But I've given up on RedHat. Maybe Fedora, but for my friends (and that includes business) RH is not worth recommending if you've ever used SuSE.
And yeah, support is ESSENTIAL - communities are IMO *good* things even though it's for some a culture shock
You're right in that Mark could possibly do that, but consider it a generic question, and there's much need for charity work than even Mark could possibly fund (another reason for the community driven approach).
;-). I'm doing this with the help of some friends and we'll rather chip in than ask for money - about the only cost we have is an ADSL pipe ;-)
There are more projects "out there" that could do with help, and not (for instance) every charity has spare cash - or is even seen by a Government as sexy enough to fund, especially if it's for a minority). In some cases it's a matter of just giving charities some more affordable advice - the usual suspect have there too been busy selling 'the habit' that they now need to kick in order to keep their money for their original charitable goals..
I have to declare an interest here, I've just picked up 5 old PCs from a bank in central London which will be used to set up the IT for a very small school (3 classrooms, all volunteers, funded entirely by donations - and all NOT in English) - after, of course, mil spec datawiping of the hard disks
Both sites are probably built from the same popular Content Management System Geeklog".
;-).
You can play with a number of them at OpenSource CMS.
You are affected by reading too much RIAA, SCO and Microsoft coverage: not everything looking similar is theft or ripoff
The idea is that the water in the hose heats up, but a hose offers quite a high resistance to flow so you typically need a pump to keep it circulating. You store the heated water in a tank from where you loop it through the hose again, and it'll get warmer and warmer.
;-). The heat there is so massive that even with huge inefficencies you still have to ensure the system can vent - if it works too well you can end up with steam which tends to be a mildly unpopular option for showers ;-)
A better solution you'll find in practically any house in Cyprus: they typically buffer drinking water on top of the house (for levelling pressure and demand), and you'll see a secondary tank fed below that which also includes a loop into a solar heater array (typically a metal box with metal pipes, blackened and covered with glass). The piping used is so wide that the natural rise of warm water creates the required circulation so you have seriously hot wat water after a while for virtually no running costs or maintenance.
I used that same principle to build one while I was in Thailand (I got bored one day
Hi Mark, as with any (F)OSS project you're almost entirely depending on volunteers. That's OK for popular projects, but to work on, say, an admin or accounting back-end someone still needs to do the heavy lifting without the promise of the kind of glamour and street cred that the likes of Firefox offer.
Have you found a way to get support for the less sexy projects and if so, how?
Given the potential for covert surveillance and the almost uncontrolled assault on pricavy that's taking place with "9/11" as excuse, what do you reckon the chances are you get a /short/ range RFID in that passport?
[title refers to a Gary Larson cartoon]
You don't appear to realise that an RFID is readable over quite a distance (spec says 30 feet or so, but double that distance has been tested).
Suitably equipped you could pick a US passport carrier out of a crowd - IMO a very unhealthy idea.
A barcode, OK. RFID or similar broadcasting device, not OK.
= Ch =
I find that a somewhat strange statement. Are you really sure there's no-one in Russia contributing to (F)OSS? Given the quality of coders they have there (hardcore trained because they had to reverse engineer everything - cool stimulation through US embargos, btw) that would rather surprise me.
Anyone?
The nice thing about UltraVNC is that it has a chat and file transfer facility built in, which is extremely helpful when helping someone on remote, and with the video driver even dialup is useful. I wish it had a Linux counterpart that would take those extra facilities.
;-).
...
As for Linux use, any of them will do. I've tried VNC from Win to Linux and vice versa, and have used x2x, win2vnc and x2vnc as well (a must try if you have a desktop AND laptop
Now, if we could only get that middle mouse button to work