For an alternative, check out the linksys wrt54g and the wrt54gs. Linksys has released the full source code and build environment to these routers enabling you to extend the linux install that these are based on.
These devices are not as powerful as the meshbox, but they are much cheaper. They also have more ethernet ports to add a switch/dmz/whatever, although there's only a single wireless device.
While I haven't had the pleasure of working with any of these $10M install of a network management suite, I've been able to accomplish much of what you talk about using an assortment of the following open source tools:
Granted, none of these have real slick guis, and there is a bit of a learning curve to get over before you master them. However, for somebody who knows how to use the above tools, it's amazing the number of machines can be administered by one person.
quote: WaMu came up with an actual original idea and patented.
Imagine, for a moment, that the inventors of my examples *had* patented them. Such that for 20 years, nobody could build a drive-thru, doctor's office, or single-file checkout queue. The issue isn't if their idea is original (and Border's, Ikea, WalMart, etc would contest that it's not). The issue, however, is that the negative impact of allowing them a government-granted monopoly on a building layout grossly outweighs any incentive this patent might have given them to implement this idea.
Here's a list of other building layouts that pop into mind as patentable based on this precedent:
fast-food drive thru
Ikea's linear flow (start in one spot, pay at the end
Doctors' offices with the front desk and waiting room and the numerous patients' rooms behind the door.
Fry's electronics queueing layout with impulse shelves
Stadium Seating in the movies
Casino layouts that obscure the exit
I was hoping to one day contract an architect to design a house that perfectly suited my family's needs. It would suck to have to get a patent attorney to check for prior art on my "invention".
Re:"As an Indian-American..." Oblig Simpsons
on
Spider-Man in India
·
· Score: 1
we use naim at our colo facility to communicate since cell phones don't work there. None of the servers have an X server installed on them (why should they).
I'm doing a lot of network debugging and the lack of a proper command line is just infuriating. For example, I've got a laptop with two ethernet ports that I plug into various machines to sniff traffic and test network configs with commands like:
Now, granted this stuff can all be done on windows (and a lot of the commands are ported to windows) but a lot of it requires clicking into random dialog boxes. It's so much faster to hit control-r 'dhcli' and get a previous command, or even roll a few common sequences into a shell script (or a one-liner that I just hold in the history buffer).
Perhaps this is just my ignorance of windows command-line abilities (it seems everything I want to do on windows is done by the 'net' command for some reason), but there's just so much more depth with a real unix shell.
Granted, being this anal in regular conversations is being a "GODDAMNED PEDANTIC GEEK-ASS DICKWEED" as you say. Geeks do have a tendancy to be annoying in this way.
However, lawyers are even worse, and legal-speak is supposed to be pedantic and specific. The legal system wouldn't work very well if eulas just said: "don't do bad stuff dickweed". The fact that they're specific makes them easy to enforce.
well, if it makes you feel any better, we just made a purchasing decision against cisco in favor of two simple linux boxes running a combination of shorewall and heartbeat. The cost savings versus the cheapest cisco firewall that does failover was worth the effort of installing the open source software. I also highly recommend m0n0wall for a SOHO cisco replacement. I'd chose m0n0wall over a cheaper watchguard or sonicwall box any day.
The problem with the "Winux" and "Lackintosh" arguments is that the name Linux and Macintosh were never used in conjunction with computing before theire respective owners named them. However, the term "Windows" had been used to refer to GUI elements before microsoft decided to make it their trademark. Additionally, there are many products out there called "Windows Foo" that do not get sued by Microsoft for using the name Windows. Under trademark law, it is illegal to selectively enforce your trademark.
Many of my former coworkers and college friends who used to geek out with me have left the IT industry. I just can't stop though. I used to put in 10 hour days just to write more code on the 2 hours of free time I had remaining. Computing is pretty much my only major hobby and it consumes me. I often fret about being so one-dimensional but then there's no point in denying who you are. I'm a CS geek till the end, and I'm loving every minute of it.
That being said, if I could get paid playing waterpolo, I could probably cope with the lost coding time spent in the pool.
I've had the misfortune to use satellite internet. Here's a quick summary on how it behaves:
- ssh sessions or terminal server are unusable so if you do any remote access of any machines, forget it.
- web browsing is about the speed of a dialup unless you're looking at pages that are one huge chunk of html with no images. Most pages these days are lots of little images which totally lags on satellite. Note that you may reduce the pain with caching proxies and/or HTTP keepalive/pipelining but it's a lot of work, and at least one of your daily reads will not improve with this.
Anyways, unless you're out in the middle of the jungle, I'd just stick with cheap dialup. You can save your money up and build a long range wifi link.
Apparently anyone cat get a patent on anything too. And while that fact is not really news, it's somewhat interesting to see recent examples of this fact.
From the article: It involves market research and number crunching and presentations and conjecture and coffee, all of which are critical elements of business success.
All too often these days companies place too much emphasis on market research and number crunching and not enough emphasis on coffee.
One interesting effect from the fires in California (specifically San Diego) is that the smoke has made it very easy to view the sun. Since the smoke has been so dense, the sun has appeared as this rich red-orange disc in the sky, with little dark dots on it where the solar flares are. I wish I had taken a picture, but I'm sure somebody can dig one up on google.
The silly thing with all of this is that the drivers and support for this card that result from the reverse engineering will ultimately result in more sales. It seems so counter-intuitive for VIA to resist this.
You're right. Bandwidth also serves a big purpose in finishing requests quickly. For example, let's see what happens when I have a 1.5mbps line with 512 concurrent requests. First of all, if you're using apache 1.3.X or 2.0 prefork, you've filled 2 gigs of ram by spawning 512 clients. Furthermore, you're bandwidth allocation per-client is 384 bytes/sec. This means you're spoon feeding your pages to your clients which makes it really hard for your server to get that 512 number down to something manageable.
The problem here, is that the bandwidth bottleneck will make your server either (a) run out of processes/threads, (b) run out of ports/sockets, or (c) run out of memory from spawning all of the processes/threads to handle all of the stalled connections.
Once this happens, people no longer can connect to you, and you're toast. The crazy thing here is that this can happen even at 10mbit/sec if you're machine is configured well enough, and if the content you're serving is large enough (IE: image/media serving).
So cheers for these guys at keeping their bandwidth/server ratio high, I actually really like their architecture. But note that the greatest architecture in the world won't save you from a slashdotting if your server(s) are on a business dsl line.
What about people who do homebrew console programs? I'm a commercial game developer, and I've modded my console solely for the purpose of enabling me to take my work home.
The problem with these DMCA-ish rulings is that even if mod-chips are substantially used for copyright violations, when you ban them, you screw all of the people who use them for legitimate use.
Yeah, taking a piss at MS in this manner just reduces slashdot's (already dubious) credibility. I've worked with both windows and linux machines in a production online environment and I can say that I've had to scramble to fix security holes for both of them in the last year. The apache chunk vulnerability and one of the recent ssh vulnerabilities really sucked, but that might be just because I've trusted apache+ssh more than I've trusted the windows machine.
However, despite having to scramble for bugs on both OSes, I still prefer linux for one reason: I've got the source. For example, I was able to backport the apache chunking patch to 1.3.12 instead of having to upgrade. Heck, they even backported it to 1.2.X just because they could. With the source, I can decide how I want to make my systems secure. With Windows, it's run their patch application and hope it doesn't screw anything up. Who knows what the patch is even doing. And good luck getting MS to release patches as old as apache 1.2.X
So in conclusion, slashdot editors are overly biased and need to be a bit more secure in their technology decisions. Perhaps my reasoning above can show that despite their FUD, perhaps they made the right decision in technology, but for different reasons.
..a wonderful article like this comes along. Granted I had to wade through the 10 previous posts of reviews on RH9 that catalogued every change to the gui, but this one made it all worthwhile.
In fact, it's articles like this that make me wade through the oodles and oodles of whining about jobs, or the DMCA. Gems like this make it all worthwhile.
I'm not sure when slashdot decided to turn all political, but I really miss the technical stuff like this. Does anyone have any suggestions on slashdot alternatives?
Unfortunately, I had the displeasure of reading this book. While the subject matter is right up my (and most slashdotter's) alley, the author lacks the ability to actually present characters, and a story that is worth reading. It's like watching a documentary on the discovery channel with the volume turned all the way down. You're pretty sure it's supposed to be something you like but by the end, you never really got anything useful from it.
If you're considering buying this novel, don't. It's really bad, even if you are a videogame geek.
Slashdot Mirror
For an alternative, check out the linksys wrt54g and the wrt54gs.
Linksys has released the full source code and build environment to these routers enabling you to extend the linux install that these are based on.
These devices are not as powerful as the meshbox, but they are much cheaper. They also have more ethernet ports to add a switch/dmz/whatever, although there's only a single wireless device.
Multiple projects have sprung up to extend the functionality of these routers, along with a bunch of informational sites about other hacking projects
While I haven't had the pleasure of working with any of these $10M install of a network management suite, I've been able to accomplish much of what you talk about using an assortment of the following open source tools:
OpenNMS
cfengine
nagios
Granted, none of these have real slick guis, and there is a bit of a learning curve to get over before you master them. However, for somebody who knows how to use the above tools, it's amazing the number of machines can be administered by one person.
quote: WaMu came up with an actual original idea and patented.
Imagine, for a moment, that the inventors of my examples *had* patented them. Such that for 20 years, nobody could build a drive-thru, doctor's office, or single-file checkout queue. The issue isn't if their idea is original (and Border's, Ikea, WalMart, etc would contest that it's not). The issue, however, is that the negative impact of allowing them a government-granted monopoly on a building layout grossly outweighs any incentive this patent might have given them to implement this idea.
I was hoping to one day contract an architect to design a house that perfectly suited my family's needs. It would suck to have to get a patent attorney to check for prior art on my "invention".
I could google more up, but I found these:m l s .html
http://www.snpp.com/other/articles/flash.html
http://www.beliefnet.com/story/78/story_7843_1.ht
http://www.lorenjavier.com/toychest/asian/simpson
http://members.aol.com/Jovifan2/Apu.html
I thought Apu was from Pakistan?
we use naim at our colo facility to communicate since cell phones don't work there. None of the servers have an X server installed on them (why should they).
Granted, being this anal in regular conversations is being a "GODDAMNED PEDANTIC GEEK-ASS DICKWEED" as you say. Geeks do have a tendancy to be annoying in this way.
However, lawyers are even worse, and legal-speak is supposed to be pedantic and specific. The legal system wouldn't work very well if eulas just said: "don't do bad stuff dickweed". The fact that they're specific makes them easy to enforce.
well, if it makes you feel any better, we just made a purchasing decision against cisco in favor of two simple linux boxes running a combination of shorewall and heartbeat. The cost savings versus the cheapest cisco firewall that does failover was worth the effort of installing the open source software. I also highly recommend m0n0wall for a SOHO cisco replacement. I'd chose m0n0wall over a cheaper watchguard or sonicwall box any day.
The problem with the "Winux" and "Lackintosh" arguments is that the name Linux and Macintosh were never used in conjunction with computing before theire respective owners named them. However, the term "Windows" had been used to refer to GUI elements before microsoft decided to make it their trademark. Additionally, there are many products out there called "Windows Foo" that do not get sued by Microsoft for using the name Windows. Under trademark law, it is illegal to selectively enforce your trademark.
And to bring this full-circle I'd like to point out that Hamlet is availiable for free from Project Gutenberg
Many of my former coworkers and college friends who used to geek out with me have left the IT industry. I just can't stop though. I used to put in 10 hour days just to write more code on the 2 hours of free time I had remaining. Computing is pretty much my only major hobby and it consumes me. I often fret about being so one-dimensional but then there's no point in denying who you are. I'm a CS geek till the end, and I'm loving every minute of it.
That being said, if I could get paid playing waterpolo, I could probably cope with the lost coding time spent in the pool.
Apu is not from India, he is from Ramatur, Pakistan.
I've had the misfortune to use satellite internet. Here's a quick summary on how it behaves:
- ssh sessions or terminal server are unusable so if you do any remote access of any machines, forget it.
- web browsing is about the speed of a dialup unless you're looking at pages that are one huge chunk of html with no images. Most pages these days are lots of little images which totally lags on satellite. Note that you may reduce the pain with caching proxies and/or HTTP keepalive/pipelining but it's a lot of work, and at least one of your daily reads will not improve with this.
Anyways, unless you're out in the middle of the jungle, I'd just stick with cheap dialup. You can save your money up and build a long range wifi link.
Apparently anyone cat get a patent on anything too. And while that fact is not really news, it's somewhat interesting to see recent examples of this fact.
From the article:
It involves market research and number crunching and presentations and conjecture and coffee, all of which are critical elements of business success.
All too often these days companies place too much emphasis on market research and number crunching and not enough emphasis on coffee.
One interesting effect from the fires in California (specifically San Diego) is that the smoke has made it very easy to view the sun. Since the smoke has been so dense, the sun has appeared as this rich red-orange disc in the sky, with little dark dots on it where the solar flares are. I wish I had taken a picture, but I'm sure somebody can dig one up on google.
I believe somebody sells the XSLT scripts to transform OO docs to html and then you can use axkit or cocoon on the server-side.
The silly thing with all of this is that the drivers and support for this card that result from the reverse engineering will ultimately result in more sales. It seems so counter-intuitive for VIA to resist this.
You're right. Bandwidth also serves a big purpose in finishing requests quickly. For example, let's see what happens when I have a 1.5mbps line with 512 concurrent requests. First of all, if you're using apache 1.3.X or 2.0 prefork, you've filled 2 gigs of ram by spawning 512 clients. Furthermore, you're bandwidth allocation per-client is 384 bytes/sec. This means you're spoon feeding your pages to your clients which makes it really hard for your server to get that 512 number down to something manageable.
The problem here, is that the bandwidth bottleneck will make your server either (a) run out of processes/threads, (b) run out of ports/sockets, or (c) run out of memory from spawning all of the processes/threads to handle all of the stalled connections.
Once this happens, people no longer can connect to you, and you're toast. The crazy thing here is that this can happen even at 10mbit/sec if you're machine is configured well enough, and if the content you're serving is large enough (IE: image/media serving).
So cheers for these guys at keeping their bandwidth/server ratio high, I actually really like their architecture. But note that the greatest architecture in the world won't save you from a slashdotting if your server(s) are on a business dsl line.
What about people who do homebrew console programs? I'm a commercial game developer, and I've modded my console solely for the purpose of enabling me to take my work home.
The problem with these DMCA-ish rulings is that even if mod-chips are substantially used for copyright violations, when you ban them, you screw all of the people who use them for legitimate use.
Yeah, taking a piss at MS in this manner just reduces slashdot's (already dubious) credibility. I've worked with both windows and linux machines in a production online environment and I can say that I've had to scramble to fix security holes for both of them in the last year. The apache chunk vulnerability and one of the recent ssh vulnerabilities really sucked, but that might be just because I've trusted apache+ssh more than I've trusted the windows machine.
However, despite having to scramble for bugs on both OSes, I still prefer linux for one reason: I've got the source. For example, I was able to backport the apache chunking patch to 1.3.12 instead of having to upgrade. Heck, they even backported it to 1.2.X just because they could. With the source, I can decide how I want to make my systems secure. With Windows, it's run their patch application and hope it doesn't screw anything up. Who knows what the patch is even doing. And good luck getting MS to release patches as old as apache 1.2.X
So in conclusion, slashdot editors are overly biased and need to be a bit more secure in their technology decisions. Perhaps my reasoning above can show that despite their FUD, perhaps they made the right decision in technology, but for different reasons.
..a wonderful article like this comes along. Granted I had to wade through the 10 previous posts of reviews on RH9 that catalogued every change to the gui, but this one made it all worthwhile.
In fact, it's articles like this that make me wade through the oodles and oodles of whining about jobs, or the DMCA. Gems like this make it all worthwhile.
I'm not sure when slashdot decided to turn all political, but I really miss the technical stuff like this. Does anyone have any suggestions on slashdot alternatives?
Unfortunately, I had the displeasure of reading this book. While the subject matter is right up my (and most slashdotter's) alley, the author lacks the ability to actually present characters, and a story that is worth reading. It's like watching a documentary on the discovery channel with the volume turned all the way down. You're pretty sure it's supposed to be something you like but by the end, you never really got anything useful from it.
If you're considering buying this novel, don't. It's really bad, even if you are a videogame geek.