We know little of the great builders of European Cathedrals. Their work may have stood the test of time, as will GPL software model, but the debates, personalities and even the names of the people that built the largest and most sophisticated structures of their age are forever lost.
Pyramid builders of Egypt, carved their stories into the stone walls of buildings and tombs, (they painted and carved plaster as well, but that stuff is deteriorating) with possibly the oldest written language, hyroglyphs.
We have created and lost more data this century than in all recorded history. We need stable storage systems, or everything that we ever knew, will disappear, without nuclear war, without meteor strike, without thought, just neglect.
Knoppix is very easy to maintain lab with. Because it is a bootable CD-OS, it boots like a CD based game station. Even a minimally trained shapperon can reboot or grab a fresh knoppix CD to run the lab most of the time. And it is linux with all the zero licensing cost and ideals to boot.;)
I was the first person to mention knoppix on slashdot and know it will slash your maintenance budget and hassle factor.
Give people links to sites that matter, email, media, classifieds (ebay and dating), search engines and more. Link with every local media organization. TV, radio, newspaper. I help set-up a lab in a poor and mostly black section of DC, linking to African newspaper intrigued many otherwise disinterested adults. Classified ads such as ebay and dating websites are very useful for many people.
Train Office tools and provide a printer, but call the courses "writing school essays", "resumes and cover letter writing". This will break your audience into school aged, and adult job seekers.
Setup a graphics worksation, to scan and edit photos. A cheap fixed in place camera for taking and email photos will help those using dating sites or emailing distant friends (e.g. in college or the military) pics of themselves or new babies.
These steps will rope in users and start a community of interest. Hopefully things will snowball from there.
MacOS refugee, paper MCSE, Linux wanna be! first person to mention knoppix on slashdot
Groundwater is poluted by engine oil, petrol, and jp5 jet fuel leaking from storage tanks in all 50 states and every country on the globe.
Hydrocarbon groundwater pollution is a much more widespread problem than soluable uranium. People with water wells 10 miles from Miami International Airport (MIA) can smell JP5 jet fuel in their well water. This is clear cut opportunity for bioremediation. People store and therefore leak hydrocarbons where they can and do use them.
As population and water needs rise, and supply dwindles, the US Federal Government has been forced to act. In the 1990's, to reduce the hydrocarbon pollution of groundwater, the US Government forced every gas station (petrol filling station) to dig up every storage tank and the soils surrounding the tank, and leave the dirt in piles to "off gas" the hydro carbons for months. And after off gassing, station owners had to replace the tanks with less leaky modern tanks.
Because water is essential for life, yet difficult to move economically, there will be increased border wars and politcal fights to control rivers and aquafers. We are watching a war for control of the oil rich country of Iraq. We will see similar fights and politcal disputes for control of rivers and dams on many international rivers. We will also see a marked rise in the trade of grain, one of the few water intensive commodities that can be traded economically.
All of this spells a golden opportunity for bioremediation of hydrocarbons, to help cities, farms, and countries to improve supply of potable water.
Mac refugee, paper MCSE, Linux wanna be and first person to mention knoppix on/.
0) If you build it, they will come.
Get a day job and give the open source world another gift. Prove that your ideas and coding
are worth something with a working example. Better yet, write the code for your Senior Thesis, Masters, PhD or post-doc work. That way you get real academic credentials for your code.
1) Ask for donations
Many people have asked for simple gifts from Amazon, Amazon Honor System and Paypal to earn something.
2) Attract Hardware Makers self interest.
Hardware manufacturers and distributers have many times provided test hardware, internal specs and sometimes even sample drive code to get linux and open source support for their hardware. Some times hardware corps won't help due to Intelletual Property concerns and fear of Microsoft.
3) Corporate Support of pure Open Source software projects.
Company support is much less common with pure software projects than hardware driver projects.
Companies that sell support services, e.g. IBM, have been very generious. Distrobution providers such as RedHat, Mandrake, and others, have also support key projects.
4) Sell expansion customizations and features
This requires planning when you start the project. If the project frame work handles plug ins easily, this model may be much easier to work with. Webmin is a good example of a project like this.
5) Dual track licenses
Ghostscript, the opensource PostScript language interpreter, used for printing and viewing PDF files,
has a dual track license, where GPL version is released months after the restricted version of software. Non-commercial use of the restricted software is free, but the commercial users must pay a license to require and/or redistribute the restricted newest version. If they wait, they can use the GPL version as per normal.
6) Pay for Book or Documentation
Many developers have written the definative guide to their software. Printing a book ensures they get some money for the work. Enlightened publishers such as OReilly have let projects such as SAMBA redistribute free PDF copies for all users of the project, letting readers see the value, and then buy this critical refence book. But remember, few projects have the depth or significance to require a full book.
7) Contract Work
Your client, a School, Business, local gevernment, hires you to solve their problem, write several key requirements into the contract, such as, "Coder owns the rights to code, this is not a work for hire. Coder delivers GPL version of final deliverable to the Client." This allows Client to fix code should you be hit by a bus, and the GPL project to get started. This allows the coder to assign the right to Free Software Foundation, and fork licenses like GhostScript.
8) Non-Profit Foundation Grant
Grant writing produces bigger blocks of money than paypal donations, for short periods of time (1 to 3 years), and are almost never renewed. Grants are complex business. Also foundation generally do NOT understand software, which could create havoc with developers and foundations, trying to figure out how to guage a successful grant. Open Source coders need to record copies downloaded, bugs squashed, features added, and estimate user community attained with such financial support. This is not stuff open source people normally spend much time on. Once the grant expires, its back to rice and beans, or mana from heav^H^H^H^H err... IBM.
9) Hotmail business model
Pay for development because it helps your bottom line, and open source tools let you scale your business faster. Give back what you write, cause all those open source tools you are using are saving you a pile on licenses.
10) Create an honor system license
Ask corprate IT chiefs to buy fig leaf GPL license that will make it past their accountants, an
LRP is the grand daddy of many "embedded" linux projects. LRP proved two concepts, 1) the need for GPL appliances that run from ram and essentially read-only media, and 2) a clever compressed read-only package system (.lrp instead of.rpm or.deb) for conserving boot media storage space. These ideas spawned LEAF, CoyoteLinux, and forshaddowed Knoppix, which all boot from floppy or CD-R media with compressed files to improve storage.
LRP was floppy firewall distro, that did not need a harddrive. It needed only 386 PC or better, 2 Nics, floppy drive, and sometimes a keyboard and monitor. It did not do fancy things, just NAT routing, firewalling and DHCP. But you could add.lrp packages for other cool features like DNS caching. The.lrp packages were just a renamed.tar.gz with binaries compiled a certain way, but they worked and saved space. Although building an LRP floppy was not easy for a novice, the package system made floppy firewall setup MUCH easier. With developers shrinking package sizes again and again, other lrp packages could be added, or log files could be added. Very clever.
But LRP failed to inivate fast enough, (e.g. I lobbied for a bootable CDs, to no avail) or document well enough, so Linux Embedded Application Firewall [LEAF] forked off. LEAF got space on SourceForge and spawned flavors, such as Oxygen, Dachstein, Eiger, Bering and others quickly helped fill out the space, improving core technologies and documentation. LEAF added bootable CDs and tons of packages. But LEAF struggled with picking a GlibC version and development of extensions became some what Balkanized.
The size limitation of the floppy made 2.4 kernal and iptables unatainable. Chuck Stienkhuler removed this boundry with his LRP-CD, which could fit every major linux ethernet driver, and so much more.
When I saw that, I thought, "well why not a full distro on a bootable CD", and was pleasently surprised by finding Knoppix. I even was the first person to mentioned it on Slashdot. [search Knoppix in stories on slashdot and find the first entry:) ]
LRP also spawned the CoyoteLinux firewall, which added a Win32 floppy build exe and a linux floppy build bash script. It makes building a floppy firewall really easy.
Death of LRP is not a surprise with LEAF on the scene. There is much life in the "embedded" linux space beyond firewalls. LRP got thing moving and many other GPL projects have adopted the core ideas and kept up the rate of acceleration. Bootable CD distros are exploding, into Mesh Networks, MAME systems, Linux on X-box hacks, PVR systems, LAN MP3 Servers, print server, LAN DNScache/DHCP/NTP server, Honey Pots and on and on. We will se more and more bootable CD distros, that will make our lives easier, and take the strain out of admin and system upgrade. Oh look, a new ISO on line, I down load and reboot my system. If it does not work, I pop the old CD-R back in. No muss, no fuss.
LRP is dead, long live LEAF and Knoppix, and...
-Nathaniel Mac Refugee, Paper MCSE, Linux wanna be.
Re:When you think about it...
on
Searching Sound
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· Score: 2, Informative
See or read "Killing Pablo" and then tell me what you think about catching an individual from an intercepted phone call. The U.S. Government poured top flight resources (NSA and Delta Force) on the problem of helping a Colombian Government military unit find and kill drug king-pin Pablo Escobar. Escobar was killed by this Colombian military unit.
This technology would help immensely on message analysis. Evaluating messages typically is divided into two areas, signal analysis, and message analysis.
Signal Analysis is when and where the signal (phone, fax, email, ham radio, etc.) originated and went to. Even if you can't read the messages, the signal analysis may be all that one needs.
Message analysis means understanding the content of the message. Decrypting or deciphering the message is common problem for text based messages. Voice is much harder to scramble in telephone networks. Once a message is opened, can "Voice matching" quickly and accurately discern who is speaking, regardless of where and to whom signal analysis says the telephone numbers belongs to. Indexing and phoneme transcription clearly helps analysts search for instances and patterns. But this is not a transcription, this phoneme transcription, that reduces the mountain of words in a language to 25 sounds. Search results can bring too many hits, or none, because people are using ambigious pronouns or homonyms, like "He" instead "Pablo" or "Their|There|They're", that ambiguate the meaning for the search tool. Ultimately message analysis requires understanding the way people in an organization think and speak. Indexing and transcription technology can help but not replace people understanding. What does "I dropped off the package." mean to you?
The other place that phonemes transcription could be helpful is with Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS). The CIA set up FBIS during the Cold War to monitor news services around the world in native languages. FBIS helped monitor trends and propaganda.
There are a pile of registry keys in the win32 registry that would help smooth migration to linux. GPL software desperately needs tools to audit MS Windows systems for windows license compliance and to smooth migration to GPL software such as GNU/Linux.
For example, all the network settings, Outlook Express mail settings, time zones, IE favorites and cookies for major sites (e.g. Nytimes &/.), software packages installed, and hardware
(for driver needs) could all be easily extracted from the Registry and other places.
If this were to be complete, it should also grab the passwords for logins and email accounts.
Also, if you think about it, if A charges B for anything going from B to A and B charges A for anything going from A to B, you end up cancelling much of the money they make from one another. Granted, the larger ISP will most likely come out ahead, but it still needs to pay its bills.
I wish you could count! Request and ACK packets are small, so all traffic from B to A would earn A small fees. Yet reply traffic (images, iso, mp3s) is huge, so A pays B? Are you nuts?!?
Remember the slashdot story on African ISPs having to foot the connection bill? The fundamental problem is that peripheral networks foot the bill to connect to larger networks, which foot the bill to connect to themselves (via backbones) and which connect to yet larger networks.
So why should governments regulate this? What kind of abuse is going on? If the edge players did not buy the connection, they would die.
Large players (e.g. AOL and MCI) are the ones vulnerable to bankruptcy for spending too heavily on infrastructure, that is quickly out of date.
Does anyone know how this compares with current rotor blade engines for noise? Would this engine be camoflage, or engine noise? The US Navy developed a system that pushed bubles under hispeed patrol boats that camoflaged the hull to torpedos.
Ignoring unkown noise issues, clearly this is a boon for mother nature already. Removing moving parts and oil lubricants is good for water. Removing rotor blades is good for humans, marine life and all sorts of rope, line, anchors and so on. Lastly removing moving parts below water should dramatically improve engine reliability, saving everyone tax dollars spent on US Coast Guard responding to engine failures.
-Mac Refugee, Paper MCSE, Linux Wanna be.
Re:Unbelievably depressing?
on
Immortal Code
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· Score: 1
Planning ahead with contracts and BSD license could solve this. Letting the Bakers keep a "doomsday" source code archive and writing contracts that allowed the Bakers to "break glass" and open their code if the souce code buyer (H and L) defrauded them (manipulated stock price by more that 75%) or went bankrupt would largely resolve this sort of problem.
Assuming this is true, (ignoring the 1500 lines a day), what else could he be doing?
Judging by harddisk prices, client side cacheing algorythms would make sense. Cacheing many portal and search engine homepages is a powerful start. Combined with a central server that then reviews these popular pages for changes, and publishes a simple summary for the browser client to collect and compare with older summaries, then a browser can collect only updated portal pages for the cache, all optimizes portal renders.
Then less common homepages, such as the high school I attended, can be gleened from users typed-in webaddress history, and automatically cached as chron-job.
Creating cached copies of commonly used graphics on portal website can save a ton of bandwidth. Again a server based bot could rate the linkcount of graphics on portal sites, and if the graphic has changed, and then post this list for browsers to collect for caching. Searching HTML for imagefiles, that are already stored in the cache, and modify the page on the fly to call only the cached image would save bandwidth. e.g. caching all of slashdot's article catagory icons.
Then the tricky part, "which linked pages to cache while the user reads a page?", so that when a link is clicked, the pages renders fast. I would download the html from all of them, and while the reader reads, check for already cached images, and then start downloading image files.
-Mac Refugee, Paper MCSE, Linux Wanna be! and first poster of the word "knoppix"
The front of the house. The windows on the left are to my room.
In my window sits a cheap barcode reader. It's powered by a computer power supply I ripped from an old computer.
Anyone who wants to get into the house can scan a barcode that they carry. A video store gave me a little keychain barcode which I'm using here. The scanner has a CCD; I don't have to slide the barcode. The scanner actually has a beeper that I can control from the computer. You can hear it beep from outside the window.
Here's the driver circuit I slapped together for the barcode reader. It's just a MAX232 chip that converts CMOS/TTL levels to the RS232 spec. The output connects to the serial port of one of my Linux boxes. That box runs a trivial python program to read a packet from the serial port and send it via TCP/IP to another computer in the house.
The receiving computer is connected to this K8000 experimenter board. I2C chips on this board . If your barcode was on the list of allowed keys, I raise output 7 on this board for 6 seconds. Input 6 (the right-hand illuminated LED) shows that the door was closed when I took this picture. See below for how I sense if the door is opened or not.
Some successful reads.
When the K8000 board raises the right output signal, this driver circuit sends 24VDC to the door strike, shown below.
In this electric strike is a solenoid that relaxes the part of the strike that was holding the door closed. The door still functions as it did before, but now I have an additional way to allow the door to open.
This is the top of the door frame, where I have wedged a reed switch into the wood. There's a magnet on top of the door that closes the switch when the door is closed (hence the turned-on LED in the picture above).
Lan Pipe is cool, but what about a simple to use Music Server?
Someone please tweak Knoppix boot CD OS into a music server!
PC with, bootable CD drive, as well as Nic and sound cards. Hardisk with digital audio files, normally mounted read only, so hardpower off is no problem.
LanPipe is nice, but FM Broadcast is MUCH cheaper. It uses existing home radios, and 1 piece serves all, and no pulling cables, with this $39.95 FM solution, or that $189 FM solution.
This speech search tool works because phonemes are simple.
Cognitition and translation are VERY complex.
Phonemes are a unifying constant of speech, not cognition of language. By definition, words are converted to audible phoneme, not spelling with etemological, gramatical and syntactical meanings.
Any words used to search are converted to phonemes and then searched against a phoneme trascript of human speech, simplifying and broadening the chance of a match.
This is MUCH easier than the reverse, of converting phonemes into words, particulaarly homonyms, e.g. "pair" and "pear", "two", "to", and "too". The complexity of extracting correct words, grammar and syntax makes understanding the orignial spoken message VERY hard. We have yet to reliably solve computer cognition of (machine readable) written or spoken language.
We often use proper nouns such as people and place names. Is "Victor" some guy or the battle winner?
What would a universal translater think of a spoken question "Do you listen to Phish?"
How about the amazing French subtitles for "Pulp Fiction"? to paraphrase Travolta's pun joke... A family of tomatos are walking down the street, and the baby Tomato keeps dawdling and getting distracted, and after two warnings to keep up with the family from the Daddy tomato, the Daddy finally just looses his composure on the third time and pounds the pulp out of the baby tomato and yells 'Ketchup!'. A pun for catch-up and tomato ketchup.
The French subtitle change the joke from Tomatos to Lemons, err... rather "Citron" and on doling out punishment yells the pun "Citron presse!" meaning "Lemon hurry up!" and "lemonade!"
Universal translators are years off. High level translations will require humans for the forseeable future.
After a fair bit of research into this problem, there are three areas of research. 1) Analysis, Auditing and back-up tools for personal data on Microsoft Windows flavors. 2) Transport: floppy, CD-R, ethernet, or even USB. 3) conversion to GNU/Linux distos is the last area.
Personal or unique data I can think of includes: emails, email address books, email account settings, network settings, dial-in settings, Favorites/Bookmarks, Cookies, office suite data files, office templates, software install keys, additional fonts, games' save files, (even) background screens, audio and video files and so much more.
Each file type creates problems for location and conversion problems on each Windows flavor.
Even with perl on the Win32 platform, or a purpose built GNU win32.exe, this requires substantial basic research. Many tools exist, but only tackle very narrow slices of the auditing and conversion problems.
The primary assumption is NEVER underestimate the users ability to do dumb things, and loose critical or useful data. This requires automation of every step. Automation requires piles of basic research. After that, coding or recoding tools into a streamlined conversion suite would be a large, unwieldy, but very useful project.
A list of data file dot three endings to quickly filter data from applications is key for recognizing datafiles. No sweat, the registry has most of this. But there are zillions of applications with data files that arrive on a system under audit via disks and email, that can be easily missed. Solution, more basic research.
Each Microsoft Windows OS flavor should be audited for distinct file lists, with location, size, date stamps, and checksums, would help exclude datafiles that are proprietary and not relevant for conversion. Each common app, such as Acrobat Reader's many versions have similar difficulties. More basic research.
Unifying email conversion tools requires a Rosetta Stone of email files for win32 and linux email apps, with unified sample files more detailed than the useful, yet incomplete file specs on wotsit.org. Where are the files stored for each app? What app/format was used? How can one tell quickly and reliably?
Email Address Book conversion is handled well by interguru.com, but not fully automated at this time.
Passwords and some account settings are encrypted and can most easily collected with win32 apps that exploit win32 security dll, but these tools are not designed, licensed for GPL automated analysis, backup and migration.
I could go on, but you can see where this is going. Email me if you are interested in helping me develop this further. com dot pendletonpress at contact (reverse the word order)
There are many linux floppy only distros, or CD-Rom with floppy storage distros, that are VERY useful.
Linux Embedded Application Firewall (LEAF), which evolved from Linux Router Project (LRP) are floppy based firewalls. No hard-disk, no monitor, no keyboard, 2 Nics, 16Mb ram, and doorstop, ummm... actually I meant a 486, or even a 386.
Some LEAF firewalls use a CD-Roms, but need the floppy for settings storage, or kernal bootstraping to run the CD drive on old hardware.
Knoppix is a full desktop linux distro, XMMS, OpenOffice and so much more. Knoppix has a powerful auto-configuration script that recognizes correctly many many sound, video and nic card correctly. But Knoppix sometimes needs configurations for difficult hardware, which are stored on a floppy.
I do love my XMMS, but...
mpg123 may support lowend PCs, but XMMS has the biggest selection of plugins of any GPL MP3 player. e.g., this plugin for that remote.
We all have doorstops, ahem... older computers, that could be headless mp3 servers, great gifts, eco "Reuse me baby!" friendly, and even RULE Project consistent.
So where is the full command line and no-GUI version of XMMS?
xmms-shell [dead link] was a great start at the command line part. It has very detailed input and output of status, settings and more from the command-line. XMMS-control provides a web gui for XMMS via xmms-shell. XMMS project should encorporate a command line that elegantly handles ALL GUI commands and info displayed.
Removing the GUI, and adding full/powerful command line, would support many recipes for mp3 server.
My recipe for a server would have a headless box, wirelessly connected to the Home Entertainment Center via DVD Anywhere with remote for song skipping. Samba Server for LAN users to play music, and create playlists. A web gui for XMMS, particularly for selecting playlists (auto-converted from LAN users playlists to local). Command line also creates opportunity for a TV style GUI, to properly handle TV-out videocard, that DVD Anywhere can send to the TV!
Ideally an integrated XMMS command line would seemlessly handle multiple instances of XMMS and multiple sound cards, and dynamic reassignment of sound cards to a particular XMMS instance, for powerful whole house sound system with as many zones as sound cards on the MP3 server.
e.g., play same song in every zone/room in the house at the start of the party such as Stones "Start me up", later break out the living room zone to another XMMS instance running dance music playlist, and patio to jazz. Later, reunify the all the sound cards/rooms/zones to the XMMS instance playing Jazz.
Plan ahead. Change MS Office default file formats to friendly open formats now. Setup all servers to linux. Test users interest with Knoppix bootCD-OS. If Knoppix goes well with users install Win32 versions of favorite Open Source apps. Run your own audit of the company's win32 systems. Duplicate and convert propietary data files to open files (e.g.,.doc to.rtf) by hand if you have to, but some folks may have automated it. Find special case win32 software needs, and see if wine will support. Then convert several users at a time, starting with the tech savy, and see if you can avoid mutiny. People have invested a lot of time learning one way, they hate upgrades, (remember the last of many Microsoft and Adobe upgrades?) so be patient when you upgrade your users to Linux desktop.
Changing MS Word users default Save file format to.rtf is easy. It will make all upgrades to OpenOffice much easier, and allow several version of MS Office to play nice, even if you don't upgrade. Years later you will be able to read old MS Office files, hooray!
As many have said:
Setup servers for windows file and print, web hosting, DNS, DHCP, and SMTP (samba, apache, bind, DHCPd and sendmail) in the back office. LEAF, LRP and CoyoteLinux firewalls are an easy place to start the conversion.
Try Knoppix BootCD-OS (debian) on every box, see if users can deal. It is complete Desktop with OpenOffice, Xmms, ogg-vorbis, Gimp, FreeCiv, and tons more on 700Mb CD-R. It auto-detects a ton of hardware, such as sound at each boot, and does not get installed to harddisk. It needs 128Mb Ram, or pagefile/swapfile/scratch disk on a box with less ram. If the user can't deal, eject the CD, and reboot back to MS Windows.
Setup each Win32 computers to run a script stored on a central server, at each boot. It saves a ton of work later.
Getting Win32 users into the OpenSource thing by installing Win32 OpenOffice and Mozilla on your current MS Windows install base. See how that goes with the users.
Run an audit on your Win32 systems. Get a file dump e.g., "dir/AH/ON/S > m:\filetreedump\box2tree.txt" on Win98, and goto to regedit and dump the registry to text file e.g., m:\filetreedump\box2reg.txt.
Someone needs to write a nice perl based evaluation tool to audit what apps and software keys everyone in the Windows network is running.
Converting data is essential. Collecting data from users computer and registry, and inserting it into new email client, and Office apps should be automated, but no one has done it yet.
Wine testing for special apps is important.
After careful planning start rolling out conversions. This way you can convert data, support all the apps, and not loose users.
There are many cameras. The Metropolitan Police Department website, there are maps and address of DC red light cameras, and maps and addresses DC mobile speed trap cameras zones.
One might consider marking intersection with redlights with red highlighter, and speed trap zones with yellow, on your ADC Atlas of Greater Washington, and leave it open on the passenger seat as you drive.
With poorly implemented user rights and security. User have the right to be billed, and administrator have the rights to change anything, and there is (almost) nothing in between.
Any LAN administrator oversees a more balanced aproach, e.g., preventing most user with rights to clear the print que, from deleting all printer software, or deleting anything else. Until SS7's security is better implemented, abuse will be rampant.
This is old news, most of which was solved in the Cold War. The problem is not so much collecting, and translating information, as getting U.S. policy makers, Departments and Agencies to use the public sources, and use them correctly.
Historically, the US Government has (and may still do) purchase many periodicals, and maps abroad and shipped them to Washington DC, in quantity.
Since early in the Cold War, the U.S. Government via its Foreign Broadcast Information Service, a.k.a.FBIS, has collected, translated and published mountains of TV and radio broadcasts and newspaper articles. Many Universities have the unclassified version of FBIS on CD-Rom if you want to search it.
Journal translations are a more expensive problem. During the Cold War, U.S. translators and scientist worked through complex translations of all kinds. The critical break throughs in stealth designs came from Soviet research, translated and provided to the Lockheed Skunk Works. Skunk Works designed a diamond shaped plane that became the F-117 Stealth Fighter Bomber, the only aircraft to that date designed by electrical engineers.
Today the translation problem is its decentralization. Translations of uncommon works are selected and translation paid for by smaller itelligence offices and units. To my limited knowledge, those translations are bartered and lent between small offices, not centralized and indexed and free for all Intelligence Agencies. This sounds to me like a cost saving exercise to keep the cost of many security cleared translators down.
As for commercial sattelite coverage, U.S. Space Command identified this problem. The U.S. government has a mixture of legal shutter control, such as for images of Isreal, and monopolistic purchases of commercial images of war zones, such as exclusive buying all Ikonos images of Afganistan. This has the benefit of providing a pool of images for release to the media, while securing U.S. Sattelite technical capabilites.
As for maps, although we buy more foreign maps all the time, U.S. maps for much of the world are as good as they get. This is not to declare that they are perfect, but for example, the CIA street map of Moscow was the ONLY Moscow street map that was worth a damn.
This topic is not just old news, this is Cold War news.
Registry Editing may do what VBA hooks cannot. I have NOT used this, NOR should inexperienced users edit their registry.
Plan, read, research before editing the registry.
I have posted and edited the text below for slashdot readers.
IV48 MS Word 97 "Save As" Default Registry Key
Would you like Microsoft Word 97 to save its documents in a format other than Word 97? Just modify this key to indicate the format that you want, and it automatically saves any new document to the chosen format. It also prompts you if you try saving your document in a different format than you specified via this key. Specify one of the following values for this key. Note that [blank] means you must leave the field blank.
Key:HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\8.0\Word\Defaul t
ValueName: Default Format
DataType: REG_SZ
Value: insert value left of = sign
[blank] =Word 8.0/97 (*.doc)
MSWord6Exp =Word 6.0/95 (*.doc)
WrdPrfctWin =Word Perfect 5.x for Windows (*.doc)
WrdPrfctDOS51 =Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS (*.doc)
WrdPrfctDat =Word Perfect 5.1 or 5.2 Secondary File (*.doc)
WrdPrfctDOS50 =Word Perfect 5.0 for DOS (*.doc)
WrdPrfctDat50 =Word Perfect 5.0 Secondary File (*.doc)
HTML =HTML Document (*.html; *.htm; *.htx)
Text =Text Only (*.txt)
CRText =Text Only with Line Breaks (*.txt)
8Text =MS-DOS Text (*.txt)
8CRText =MS-DOS Text with Line Breaks (*.txt)
Unicode =Unicode Text (*.txt)
rtf =Rich Text Format (*.rtf)
Dot =Document Template (*.dot)
IV-48 MS Word 97 User Changing "Save As" Format Warning Dialog Box Registry Key
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Office\8.0\Common\Default Save
Value Name: Prompt Text
Data Type: REG_SZ
Value: "Other people, now and in the future, may not have this version of Office, so if you plan to share this file, you should save it in the RTF format."
This value sets the text that the Assistant displays when you have Default Save set to something other than Word 97 and you use the "Save As" command under the File menu. If you want users to save their documents to a specific standard, you can type the string into this value.
Ripping with Audio Jukeboxes are 1x speed, and kill functions like TOC, FreeCDDB, but you can rip everything at once. (but what did you rip?) Regular computer rip requires too much of your time swapping discs.
Audio Grabber devides the problem by 2, using 2 CD-Rom drives.
IDE and SCSI CD-Rom Changers devide the problem by 4 of 5. Loose no fuctionality. Swap them all and go to bed.
Slashdot Mirror
We know little of the great builders of European Cathedrals. Their work may have stood the test of time, as will GPL software model, but the debates, personalities and even the names of the people that built the largest and most sophisticated structures of their age are forever lost.
Pyramid builders of Egypt, carved their stories into the stone walls of buildings and tombs, (they painted and carved plaster as well, but that stuff is deteriorating) with possibly the oldest written language, hyroglyphs.
We have created and lost more data this century than in all recorded history. We need stable storage systems, or everything that we ever knew, will disappear, without nuclear war, without meteor strike, without thought, just neglect.
MacOS refugee, paper MCSE, linux wanna be!
Labs are difficult to maintain. Use knoppix.
;)
Knoppix is very easy to maintain lab with. Because it is a bootable CD-OS, it boots like a CD based game station. Even a minimally trained shapperon can reboot or grab a fresh knoppix CD to run the lab most of the time. And it is linux with all the zero licensing cost and ideals to boot.
I was the first person to mention knoppix on slashdot and know it will slash your maintenance budget and hassle factor.
Give people links to sites that matter, email, media, classifieds (ebay and dating), search engines and more. Link with every local media organization. TV, radio, newspaper. I help set-up a lab in a poor and mostly black section of DC, linking to African newspaper intrigued many otherwise disinterested adults. Classified ads such as ebay and dating websites are very useful for many people.
Train Office tools and provide a printer, but call the courses "writing school essays", "resumes and cover letter writing". This will break your audience into school aged, and adult job seekers.
Setup a graphics worksation, to scan and edit photos. A cheap fixed in place camera for taking and email photos will help those using dating sites or emailing distant friends (e.g. in college or the military) pics of themselves or new babies.
These steps will rope in users and start a community of interest. Hopefully things will snowball from there.
MacOS refugee, paper MCSE, Linux wanna be!
first person to mention knoppix on slashdot
Groundwater is poluted by engine oil, petrol, and jp5 jet fuel leaking from storage tanks in all 50 states and every country on the globe.
/.
Hydrocarbon groundwater pollution is a much more widespread problem than soluable uranium. People with water wells 10 miles from Miami International Airport (MIA) can smell JP5 jet fuel in their well water. This is clear cut opportunity for bioremediation. People store and therefore leak hydrocarbons where they can and do use them.
As population and water needs rise, and supply dwindles, the US Federal Government has been forced to act. In the 1990's, to reduce the hydrocarbon pollution of groundwater, the US Government forced every gas station (petrol filling station) to dig up every storage tank and the soils surrounding the tank, and leave the dirt in piles to "off gas" the hydro carbons for months. And after off gassing, station owners had to replace the tanks with less leaky modern tanks.
Because water is essential for life, yet difficult to move economically, there will be increased border wars and politcal fights to control rivers and aquafers. We are watching a war for control of the oil rich country of Iraq. We will see similar fights and politcal disputes for control of rivers and dams on many international rivers. We will also see a marked rise in the trade of grain, one of the few water intensive commodities that can be traded economically.
All of this spells a golden opportunity for bioremediation of hydrocarbons, to help cities, farms, and countries to improve supply of potable water.
Mac refugee, paper MCSE, Linux wanna be
and first person to mention knoppix on
I see several ways.
0) If you build it, they will come.
Get a day job and give the open source world another gift. Prove that your ideas and coding are worth something with a working example. Better yet, write the code for your Senior Thesis, Masters, PhD or post-doc work. That way you get real academic credentials for your code.
1) Ask for donations
Many people have asked for simple gifts from Amazon, Amazon Honor System and Paypal to earn something.
2) Attract Hardware Makers self interest.
Hardware manufacturers and distributers have many times provided test hardware, internal specs and sometimes even sample drive code to get linux and open source support for their hardware. Some times hardware corps won't help due to Intelletual Property concerns and fear of Microsoft.
3) Corporate Support of pure Open Source software projects.
Company support is much less common with pure software projects than hardware driver projects. Companies that sell support services, e.g. IBM, have been very generious. Distrobution providers such as RedHat, Mandrake, and others, have also support key projects.
4) Sell expansion customizations and features
This requires planning when you start the project. If the project frame work handles plug ins easily, this model may be much easier to work with. Webmin is a good example of a project like this.
5) Dual track licenses
Ghostscript, the opensource PostScript language interpreter, used for printing and viewing PDF files, has a dual track license, where GPL version is released months after the restricted version of software. Non-commercial use of the restricted software is free, but the commercial users must pay a license to require and/or redistribute the restricted newest version. If they wait, they can use the GPL version as per normal.
6) Pay for Book or Documentation
Many developers have written the definative guide to their software. Printing a book ensures they get some money for the work. Enlightened publishers such as OReilly have let projects such as SAMBA redistribute free PDF copies for all users of the project, letting readers see the value, and then buy this critical refence book. But remember, few projects have the depth or significance to require a full book.
7) Contract Work
Your client, a School, Business, local gevernment, hires you to solve their problem, write several key requirements into the contract, such as, "Coder owns the rights to code, this is not a work for hire. Coder delivers GPL version of final deliverable to the Client." This allows Client to fix code should you be hit by a bus, and the GPL project to get started. This allows the coder to assign the right to Free Software Foundation, and fork licenses like GhostScript.
8) Non-Profit Foundation Grant
Grant writing produces bigger blocks of money than paypal donations, for short periods of time (1 to 3 years), and are almost never renewed. Grants are complex business. Also foundation generally do NOT understand software, which could create havoc with developers and foundations, trying to figure out how to guage a successful grant. Open Source coders need to record copies downloaded, bugs squashed, features added, and estimate user community attained with such financial support. This is not stuff open source people normally spend much time on. Once the grant expires, its back to rice and beans, or mana from heav^H^H^H^H err... IBM.
9) Hotmail business model
Pay for development because it helps your bottom line, and open source tools let you scale your business faster. Give back what you write, cause all those open source tools you are using are saving you a pile on licenses.
10) Create an honor system license
Ask corprate IT chiefs to buy fig leaf GPL license that will make it past their accountants, an
LRP is the grand daddy of many "embedded" linux projects. LRP proved two concepts, 1) the need for GPL appliances that run from ram and essentially read-only media, and 2) a clever compressed read-only package system (.lrp instead of .rpm or .deb) for conserving boot media storage space. These ideas spawned LEAF, CoyoteLinux, and forshaddowed Knoppix, which all boot from floppy or CD-R media with compressed files to improve storage.
.lrp packages for other cool features like DNS caching. The .lrp packages were just a renamed .tar.gz with binaries compiled a certain way, but they worked and saved space. Although building an LRP floppy was not easy for a novice, the package system made floppy firewall setup MUCH easier. With developers shrinking package sizes again and again, other lrp packages could be added, or log files could be added. Very clever.
:) ]
...
LRP was floppy firewall distro, that did not need a harddrive. It needed only 386 PC or better, 2 Nics, floppy drive, and sometimes a keyboard and monitor. It did not do fancy things, just NAT routing, firewalling and DHCP. But you could add
But LRP failed to inivate fast enough, (e.g. I lobbied for a bootable CDs, to no avail) or document well enough, so Linux Embedded Application Firewall [LEAF] forked off. LEAF got space on SourceForge and spawned flavors, such as Oxygen, Dachstein, Eiger, Bering and others quickly helped fill out the space, improving core technologies and documentation. LEAF added bootable CDs and tons of packages. But LEAF struggled with picking a GlibC version and development of extensions became some what Balkanized.
The size limitation of the floppy made 2.4 kernal and iptables unatainable. Chuck Stienkhuler removed this boundry with his LRP-CD, which could fit every major linux ethernet driver, and so much more.
When I saw that, I thought, "well why not a full distro on a bootable CD", and was pleasently surprised by finding Knoppix. I even was the first person to mentioned it on Slashdot. [search Knoppix in stories on slashdot and find the first entry
LRP also spawned the CoyoteLinux firewall, which added a Win32 floppy build exe and a linux floppy build bash script. It makes building a floppy firewall really easy.
Death of LRP is not a surprise with LEAF on the scene. There is much life in the "embedded" linux space beyond firewalls. LRP got thing moving and many other GPL projects have adopted the core ideas and kept up the rate of acceleration. Bootable CD distros are exploding, into Mesh Networks, MAME systems, Linux on X-box hacks, PVR systems, LAN MP3 Servers, print server, LAN DNScache/DHCP/NTP server, Honey Pots and on and on. We will se more and more bootable CD distros, that will make our lives easier, and take the strain out of admin and system upgrade. Oh look, a new ISO on line, I down load and reboot my system. If it does not work, I pop the old CD-R back in. No muss, no fuss.
LRP is dead, long live LEAF and Knoppix, and
-Nathaniel
Mac Refugee, Paper MCSE, Linux wanna be.
See or read "Killing Pablo" and then tell me what you think about catching an individual from an intercepted phone call. The U.S. Government poured top flight resources (NSA and Delta Force) on the problem of helping a Colombian Government military unit find and kill drug king-pin Pablo Escobar. Escobar was killed by this Colombian military unit.
This technology would help immensely on message analysis. Evaluating messages typically is divided into two areas, signal analysis, and message analysis.
Signal Analysis is when and where the signal (phone, fax, email, ham radio, etc.) originated and went to. Even if you can't read the messages, the signal analysis may be all that one needs.
Message analysis means understanding the content of the message. Decrypting or deciphering the message is common problem for text based messages. Voice is much harder to scramble in telephone networks. Once a message is opened, can "Voice matching" quickly and accurately discern who is speaking, regardless of where and to whom signal analysis says the telephone numbers belongs to. Indexing and phoneme transcription clearly helps analysts search for instances and patterns. But this is not a transcription, this phoneme transcription, that reduces the mountain of words in a language to 25 sounds. Search results can bring too many hits, or none, because people are using ambigious pronouns or homonyms, like "He" instead "Pablo" or "Their|There|They're", that ambiguate the meaning for the search tool. Ultimately message analysis requires understanding the way people in an organization think and speak. Indexing and transcription technology can help but not replace people understanding. What does "I dropped off the package." mean to you?
The other place that phonemes transcription could be helpful is with Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS). The CIA set up FBIS during the Cold War to monitor news services around the world in native languages. FBIS helped monitor trends and propaganda.
Mac Refugee, paper MCSE, Linux wanna be
There are a pile of registry keys in the win32 registry that would help smooth migration to linux. GPL software desperately needs tools to audit MS Windows systems for windows license compliance and to smooth migration to GPL software such as GNU/Linux.
/.), software packages installed, and hardware
(for driver needs) could all be easily extracted from the Registry and other places.
For example, all the network settings, Outlook Express mail settings, time zones, IE favorites and cookies for major sites (e.g. Nytimes &
If this were to be complete, it should also grab the passwords for logins and email accounts.
Just a thought.
Mac Refugee, Paper MCSE, Linux Wanna be
Also, if you think about it, if A charges B for anything going from B to A and B charges A for anything going from A to B, you end up cancelling much of the money they make from one another. Granted, the larger ISP will most likely come out ahead, but it still needs to pay its bills.
I wish you could count! Request and ACK packets are small, so all traffic from B to A would earn A small fees. Yet reply traffic (images, iso, mp3s) is huge, so A pays B? Are you nuts?!?
Mac Refugee, Paper MCSE, Linux Wanna be
Remember the slashdot story on African ISPs having to foot the connection bill? The fundamental problem is that peripheral networks foot the bill to connect to larger networks, which foot the bill to connect to themselves (via backbones) and which connect to yet larger networks.
So why should governments regulate this? What kind of abuse is going on? If the edge players did not buy the connection, they would die.
Large players (e.g. AOL and MCI) are the ones vulnerable to bankruptcy for spending too heavily on infrastructure, that is quickly out of date.
Mac Refugee, paper MCSE, linux wanna be
Does anyone know how this compares with current rotor blade engines for noise? Would this engine be camoflage, or engine noise? The US Navy developed a system that pushed bubles under hispeed patrol boats that camoflaged the hull to torpedos.
Ignoring unkown noise issues, clearly this is a boon for mother nature already. Removing moving parts and oil lubricants is good for water. Removing rotor blades is good for humans, marine life and all sorts of rope, line, anchors and so on. Lastly removing moving parts below water should dramatically improve engine reliability, saving everyone tax dollars spent on US Coast Guard responding to engine failures.
-Mac Refugee, Paper MCSE, Linux Wanna be.
Planning ahead with contracts and BSD license could solve this. Letting the Bakers keep a "doomsday" source code archive and writing contracts that allowed the Bakers to "break glass" and open their code if the souce code buyer (H and L) defrauded them (manipulated stock price by more that 75%) or went bankrupt would largely resolve this sort of problem.
Mac Refugee, Paper MCSE, Linux Wanna be!
Clientside caching surely is most of the speed.
Serverside caching could be used.
TCP/IP non-comformaty is the third option.
Assuming this is true, (ignoring the 1500 lines a day), what else could he be doing?
Judging by harddisk prices, client side cacheing algorythms would make sense. Cacheing many portal and search engine homepages is a powerful start. Combined with a central server that then reviews these popular pages for changes, and publishes a simple summary for the browser client to collect and compare with older summaries, then a browser can collect only updated portal pages for the cache, all optimizes portal renders.
Then less common homepages, such as the high school I attended, can be gleened from users typed-in webaddress history, and automatically cached as chron-job.
Creating cached copies of commonly used graphics on portal website can save a ton of bandwidth. Again a server based bot could rate the linkcount of graphics on portal sites, and if the graphic has changed, and then post this list for browsers to collect for caching. Searching HTML for imagefiles, that are already stored in the cache, and modify the page on the fly to call only the cached image would save bandwidth. e.g. caching all of slashdot's article catagory icons.
Then the tricky part, "which linked pages to cache while the user reads a page?", so that when a link is clicked, the pages renders fast. I would download the html from all of them, and while the reader reads, check for already cached images, and then start downloading image files.
-Mac Refugee, Paper MCSE, Linux Wanna be!
and first poster of the word "knoppix"
Google Cached Site text with photos removed:
The front of the house. The windows on the left are to my room.
In my window sits a cheap barcode reader. It's powered by a computer power supply I ripped from an old computer.
Anyone who wants to get into the house can scan a barcode that they carry. A video store gave me a little keychain barcode which I'm using here. The scanner has a CCD; I don't have to slide the barcode. The scanner actually has a beeper that I can control from the computer. You can hear it beep from outside the window.
Here's the driver circuit I slapped together for the barcode reader. It's just a MAX232 chip that converts CMOS/TTL levels to the RS232 spec. The output connects to the serial port of one of my Linux boxes. That box runs a trivial python program to read a packet from the serial port and send it via TCP/IP to another computer in the house.
The receiving computer is connected to this K8000 experimenter board. I2C chips on this board . If your barcode was on the list of allowed keys, I raise output 7 on this board for 6 seconds. Input 6 (the right-hand illuminated LED) shows that the door was closed when I took this picture. See below for how I sense if the door is opened or not.
Some successful reads.
When the K8000 board raises the right output signal, this driver circuit sends 24VDC to the door strike, shown below.
In this electric strike is a solenoid that relaxes the part of the strike that was holding the door closed. The door still functions as it did before, but now I have an additional way to allow the door to open.
This is the top of the door frame, where I have wedged a reed switch into the wood. There's a magnet on top of the door that closes the switch when the door is closed (hence the turned-on LED in the picture above).
Closeup of the reed switch in the wood.
###
-Mac Refugee, Paper MCSE, Linux Wanna-be
Lan Pipe is very cool, particularly if the house is correcly wired with Cat5.
But what if you don't have wires already? FM is MUCH cheaper!
Uses your existing home FM radios recievers in every room, or your walkman. Simply add one of these to your music server, and no pulling cables.
$39.95 FM solution, or that
$189 FM solution.
First person to say "Knoppix" on slashdot?
Mac Refugee, Paper MCSE, Linux wanna be
Lan Pipe is cool, but what about a simple to use Music Server?
Someone please tweak Knoppix boot CD OS into a music server!
PC with, bootable CD drive, as well as Nic and sound cards. Hardisk with digital audio files, normally mounted read only, so hardpower off is no problem.
Samba and Netatalk for music via file sharing and play list creation, and LAN Pipe. Xmms with RF wireless remote and relevant plug in. Also use a webinterface to control the sound card on the server via Xmms command line tool and Web Control interface
LanPipe is nice, but FM Broadcast is MUCH cheaper. It uses existing home radios, and 1 piece serves all, and no pulling cables, with this $39.95 FM solution, or that $189 FM solution.
First person to say "Knoppix" on slashdot?
Mac Refugee, Paper MCSE, Linux wanna be
This speech search tool works because phonemes are simple.
Cognitition and translation are VERY complex.
Phonemes are a unifying constant of speech, not cognition of language. By definition, words are converted to audible phoneme, not spelling with etemological, gramatical and syntactical meanings.
Any words used to search are converted to phonemes and then searched against a phoneme trascript of human speech, simplifying and broadening the chance of a match.
This is MUCH easier than the reverse, of converting phonemes into words, particulaarly homonyms, e.g. "pair" and "pear", "two", "to", and "too". The complexity of extracting correct words, grammar and syntax makes understanding the orignial spoken message VERY hard. We have yet to reliably solve computer cognition of (machine readable) written or spoken language.
We often use proper nouns such as people and place names. Is "Victor" some guy or the battle winner?
What would a universal translater think of a spoken question "Do you listen to Phish?"
How about the amazing French subtitles for "Pulp Fiction"? to paraphrase Travolta's pun joke... A family of tomatos are walking down the street, and the baby Tomato keeps dawdling and getting distracted, and after two warnings to keep up with the family from the Daddy tomato, the Daddy finally just looses his composure on the third time and pounds the pulp out of the baby tomato and yells 'Ketchup!'. A pun for catch-up and tomato ketchup.
The French subtitle change the joke from Tomatos to Lemons, err... rather "Citron" and on doling out punishment yells the pun "Citron presse!" meaning "Lemon hurry up!" and "lemonade!"
Universal translators are years off. High level translations will require humans for the forseeable future.
Mac Refugee, Paper MCSE, Linux wanna be
After a fair bit of research into this problem, there are three areas of research. 1) Analysis, Auditing and back-up tools for personal data on Microsoft Windows flavors. 2) Transport: floppy, CD-R, ethernet, or even USB. 3) conversion to GNU/Linux distos is the last area.
.exe, this requires substantial basic research. Many tools exist, but only tackle very narrow slices of the auditing and conversion problems.
/. ever, May 17, 2002
Personal or unique data I can think of includes: emails, email address books, email account settings, network settings, dial-in settings, Favorites/Bookmarks, Cookies, office suite data files, office templates, software install keys, additional fonts, games' save files, (even) background screens, audio and video files and so much more.
Each file type creates problems for location and conversion problems on each Windows flavor.
Even with perl on the Win32 platform, or a purpose built GNU win32
The primary assumption is NEVER underestimate the users ability to do dumb things, and loose critical or useful data. This requires automation of every step. Automation requires piles of basic research. After that, coding or recoding tools into a streamlined conversion suite would be a large, unwieldy, but very useful project.
A list of data file dot three endings to quickly filter data from applications is key for recognizing datafiles. No sweat, the registry has most of this. But there are zillions of applications with data files that arrive on a system under audit via disks and email, that can be easily missed. Solution, more basic research.
Each Microsoft Windows OS flavor should be audited for distinct file lists, with location, size, date stamps, and checksums, would help exclude datafiles that are proprietary and not relevant for conversion. Each common app, such as Acrobat Reader's many versions have similar difficulties. More basic research.
Unifying email conversion tools requires a Rosetta Stone of email files for win32 and linux email apps, with unified sample files more detailed than the useful, yet incomplete file specs on wotsit.org. Where are the files stored for each app? What app/format was used? How can one tell quickly and reliably?
Email Address Book conversion is handled well by interguru.com, but not fully automated at this time.
Passwords and some account settings are encrypted and can most easily collected with win32 apps that exploit win32 security dll, but these tools are not designed, licensed for GPL automated analysis, backup and migration.
I could go on, but you can see where this is going.
Email me if you are interested in helping me develop this further.
com dot pendletonpress at contact (reverse the word order)
-Nathaniel
first Knoppix comment on
Mac refugee, MCSE, Linux wanna be
There are many linux floppy only distros, or CD-Rom with floppy storage distros, that are VERY useful.
Linux Embedded Application Firewall (LEAF), which evolved from Linux Router Project (LRP) are floppy based firewalls. No hard-disk, no monitor, no keyboard, 2 Nics, 16Mb ram, and doorstop, ummm... actually I meant a 486, or even a 386. Some LEAF firewalls use a CD-Roms, but need the floppy for settings storage, or kernal bootstraping to run the CD drive on old hardware.
Knoppix is a full desktop linux distro, XMMS, OpenOffice and so much more. Knoppix has a powerful auto-configuration script that recognizes correctly many many sound, video and nic card correctly. But Knoppix sometimes needs configurations for difficult hardware, which are stored on a floppy.
-Nathaniel
Mac Refugee, Paper MCSE, Linux Wannabe
I do love my XMMS, but...
mpg123 may support lowend PCs, but XMMS has the biggest selection of plugins of any GPL MP3 player. e.g., this plugin for that remote.
We all have doorstops, ahem... older computers, that could be headless mp3 servers, great gifts, eco "Reuse me baby!" friendly, and even RULE Project consistent.
So where is the full command line and no-GUI version of XMMS?
xmms-shell [dead link] was a great start at the command line part. It has very detailed input and output of status, settings and more from the command-line. XMMS-control provides a web gui for XMMS via xmms-shell. XMMS project should encorporate a command line that elegantly handles ALL GUI commands and info displayed.
Removing the GUI, and adding full/powerful command line, would support many recipes for mp3 server.
My recipe for a server would have a headless box, wirelessly connected to the Home Entertainment Center via DVD Anywhere with remote for song skipping. Samba Server for LAN users to play music, and create playlists. A web gui for XMMS, particularly for selecting playlists (auto-converted from LAN users playlists to local). Command line also creates opportunity for a TV style GUI, to properly handle TV-out videocard, that DVD Anywhere can send to the TV!
Ideally an integrated XMMS command line would seemlessly handle multiple instances of XMMS and multiple sound cards, and dynamic reassignment of sound cards to a particular XMMS instance, for powerful whole house sound system with as many zones as sound cards on the MP3 server. e.g., play same song in every zone/room in the house at the start of the party such as Stones "Start me up", later break out the living room zone to another XMMS instance running dance music playlist, and patio to jazz. Later, reunify the all the sound cards/rooms/zones to the XMMS instance playing Jazz.
-Nathaniel
Plan ahead. Change MS Office default file formats to friendly open formats now. Setup all servers to linux. Test users interest with Knoppix bootCD-OS. If Knoppix goes well with users install Win32 versions of favorite Open Source apps. Run your own audit of the company's win32 systems. Duplicate and convert propietary data files to open files (e.g., .doc to .rtf) by hand if you have to, but some folks may have automated it. Find special case win32 software needs, and see if wine will support. Then convert several users at a time, starting with the tech savy, and see if you can avoid mutiny. People have invested a lot of time learning one way, they hate upgrades, (remember the last of many Microsoft and Adobe upgrades?) so be patient when you upgrade your users to Linux desktop.
.rtf is easy. It will make all upgrades to OpenOffice much easier, and allow several version of MS Office to play nice, even if you don't upgrade. Years later you will be able to read old MS Office files, hooray!
.rtf to .doc is critical. The user is a tease, no email or code! But it is an idea that should be packaged.
/AH /ON /S > m:\filetreedump\box2tree.txt" on Win98, and goto to regedit and dump the registry to text file e.g., m:\filetreedump\box2reg.txt.
Someone needs to write a nice perl based evaluation tool to audit what apps and software keys everyone in the Windows network is running.
Changing MS Word users default Save file format to
As many have said:
Setup servers for windows file and print, web hosting, DNS, DHCP, and SMTP (samba, apache, bind, DHCPd and sendmail) in the back office. LEAF, LRP and CoyoteLinux firewalls are an easy place to start the conversion.
Try Knoppix BootCD-OS (debian) on every box, see if users can deal. It is complete Desktop with OpenOffice, Xmms, ogg-vorbis, Gimp, FreeCiv, and tons more on 700Mb CD-R. It auto-detects a ton of hardware, such as sound at each boot, and does not get installed to harddisk. It needs 128Mb Ram, or pagefile/swapfile/scratch disk on a box with less ram. If the user can't deal, eject the CD, and reboot back to MS Windows.
Setup each Win32 computers to run a script stored on a central server, at each boot. It saves a ton of work later.
Getting Win32 users into the OpenSource thing by installing Win32 OpenOffice and Mozilla on your current MS Windows install base. See how that goes with the users.
Convert your existing data from
Run an audit on your Win32 systems. Get a file dump e.g., "dir
Converting data is essential. Collecting data from users computer and registry, and inserting it into new email client, and Office apps should be automated, but no one has done it yet.
Wine testing for special apps is important.
After careful planning start rolling out conversions. This way you can convert data, support all the apps, and not loose users.
-Nathaniel
There are many cameras. The Metropolitan Police Department website, there are maps and address of DC red light cameras, and maps and addresses DC mobile speed trap cameras zones.
One might consider marking intersection with redlights with red highlighter, and speed trap zones with yellow, on your ADC Atlas of Greater Washington, and leave it open on the passenger seat as you drive.
-Nathaniel
With poorly implemented user rights and security. User have the right to be billed, and administrator have the rights to change anything, and there is (almost) nothing in between.
Any LAN administrator oversees a more balanced aproach, e.g., preventing most user with rights to clear the print que, from deleting all printer software, or deleting anything else. Until SS7's security is better implemented, abuse will be rampant.
-Nathaniel
This is old news, most of which was solved in the Cold War. The problem is not so much collecting, and translating information, as getting U.S. policy makers, Departments and Agencies to use the public sources, and use them correctly.
Historically, the US Government has (and may still do) purchase many periodicals, and maps abroad and shipped them to Washington DC, in quantity.
Since early in the Cold War, the U.S. Government via its Foreign Broadcast Information Service, a.k.a. FBIS, has collected, translated and published mountains of TV and radio broadcasts and newspaper articles. Many Universities have the unclassified version of FBIS on CD-Rom if you want to search it.
Journal translations are a more expensive problem. During the Cold War, U.S. translators and scientist worked through complex translations of all kinds. The critical break throughs in stealth designs came from Soviet research, translated and provided to the Lockheed Skunk Works. Skunk Works designed a diamond shaped plane that became the F-117 Stealth Fighter Bomber, the only aircraft to that date designed by electrical engineers.
Today the translation problem is its decentralization. Translations of uncommon works are selected and translation paid for by smaller itelligence offices and units. To my limited knowledge, those translations are bartered and lent between small offices, not centralized and indexed and free for all Intelligence Agencies. This sounds to me like a cost saving exercise to keep the cost of many security cleared translators down.
As for commercial sattelite coverage, U.S. Space Command identified this problem. The U.S. government has a mixture of legal shutter control, such as for images of Isreal, and monopolistic purchases of commercial images of war zones, such as exclusive buying all Ikonos images of Afganistan. This has the benefit of providing a pool of images for release to the media, while securing U.S. Sattelite technical capabilites.
As for maps, although we buy more foreign maps all the time, U.S. maps for much of the world are as good as they get. This is not to declare that they are perfect, but for example, the CIA street map of Moscow was the ONLY Moscow street map that was worth a damn.
This topic is not just old news, this is Cold War news.
-Nathaniel
Windowsitlibrary.com has an item on Microsoft Word's Save As Registry Settings. Read IV-48 and IV-47.
I have posted and edited the text below for slashdot readers.
IV48 MS Word 97 "Save As" Default Registry Key
Would you like Microsoft Word 97 to save its documents in a format other than Word 97? Just modify this key to indicate the format that you want, and it automatically saves any new document to the chosen format. It also prompts you if you try saving your document in a different format than you specified via this key. Specify one of the following values for this key. Note that [blank] means you must leave the field blank.
Key:HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\8.0\Word\Defau
ValueName: Default Format
DataType: REG_SZ
Value: insert value left of = sign
IV-48 MS Word 97 User Changing "Save As" Format Warning Dialog Box Registry Key
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Office\8.0\Common\Default Save
Value Name: Prompt Text
Data Type: REG_SZ
Value: "Other people, now and in the future, may not have this version of Office, so if you plan to share this file, you should save it in the RTF format."
This value sets the text that the Assistant displays when you have Default Save set to something other than Word 97 and you use the "Save As" command under the File menu. If you want users to save their documents to a specific standard, you can type the string into this value.
Hope these are helpful.
-Nathaniel
Ripping with Audio Jukeboxes are 1x speed, and kill functions like TOC, FreeCDDB, but you can rip everything at once. (but what did you rip?) Regular computer rip requires too much of your time swapping discs.
Audio Grabber devides the problem by 2, using 2 CD-Rom drives.
IDE and SCSI CD-Rom Changers devide the problem by 4 of 5. Loose no fuctionality. Swap them all and go to bed.