RHEL have recommended CentOS in the mailing list if you need an enterpise system and you or your company can't afford $345 a year. I guess that says alot about it.
And if your company can't afford or won't pay $345 a year for an enterprise system, that says a lot about the company.
I wonder if this means Novell is any closer to releasing a Novell Netware Client for Linux? In our shop, lots of people use Fedora Core 1,2,3 - but everyone needs to have access to files on the Novell Netware LAN. Scripts that use NCPFS get us there, but it's kind of a hack (i.e. you need to change the script if we change the server,...)
Releasing a full Novell Netware Client for Linux has been a planned thing for some time. Maybe NLD 10 will finally get us there?
If you like icons, you may also want to check out Jimmac's ikony. You've probably seen a lot of his icons already, if you use GNOME. Really great stuff!
Ok, I will freely admit to working for a University, and not the private sector. Are certifications really held in such high regard out there? I know here they mean squat...
That doesn't apply everywhere, son. I also work for a University (part of Big-10) in the enterprise support area, and I just recently hired a Linux Admin. RHCE was something we looked for in our candidates - we have already standardized on Red Hat Linux, so RHCE certainly applies. I won't say it's a deciding factor, but those who listed RHCE (or even RHCT) on their resume were automatically someone we became more interested in.
I suppose it's something else to get your foot in the door.
Another semi-obvious possible use would be to utilize similar technology to make operating a mouse on a train (or other bumpy ride) less error-prone.
I often boot my laptop during my bus commute home (30 minutes) to catch up on email, etc. Since the ride is kind of bumpy sometimes, I just turn down the "speed" of the mouse. Makes it less error-prone at the expense of taking longer to navigate menus, etc.
... I will never run fedora on a server again. A 6 month lifespan is simply way too short...
Not at all, for some situations. In the serious data center or enterprise support group, you're right - 6months is way too short. My group supports enterprise applications, and we only use RHEL because of the long product lifecycle.
But for some smaller departments who just want to set up a web site - quick - to display data or establish a shadow system that the enterprise folks don't want to support, I can see how Fedora is a good choice for them. The price tag is right, and it's quick to set up.
For personal web sites, I can also see how Fedora is a good choice. But not for hosting companies, for example.
I guess it all comes down to what you are going to do with it, and how "serious" you are about supporting the platform over the long-term.
IIRC, the UK does something like this for movies. I would have preferred a numerical-based rating system for games in the US, anyway. It is much easier for a parent to see "13+" and know that little 8-year-old Timmy probably shouldn't play that game.
>>Can't their web server just reject or redirect any page requests that don't have a referrer field of their own web site?
>Yeah, I'd have thought so. It might confuse tinfoil hat types though, or some proxies, who refuse to send referrers because the Orbitz site would break. You could, of course, use "no referrer and no session cookie" but the tinfoil hats aren't going to use cookies either.
Tin foil hat types who disallow cookies are probably a small percentage of the folks who will use Orbitz. While I hate sites that force cookies or referrers, I'd much prefer they take the technical route and do that rather than this silly "no deep linking to us or we'll C&D your ass" nonsense.
I'll probably get modded down as flamebait, but I'm no longer looking forward to GT4. It's been hyped for so long, but delayed several times, and had features taken out. This is getting old for me. I've already moved on.
I am particularly interested in the modern dance, thinking that this is probably a better approach of studying oscillations than the springs that I used when I was in college.
/self imagines the Micheal Flatley 'Lord of the Dance'-style in teaching physics.:-)
I have a 20GB iPod, but only about 12GB is used. My $HOME is about 2GB, including a bunch of digital photos, but also a bunch of documents, my email, and other stuff I'd rather not lose.
My solution is simple:
Plug in iPod
Run ~/bin/backup.sh
This is a very simple shell script that deletes the backup file already on the iPod, then does a 'tar czf - $HOME' and pipes it into gpg using circular encryption (that is, a passphrase.) The encrypted, compressed tarball (about 1.7GB) is written directly to the iPod. Takes about 20 minutes.
Eject the iPod
Done!
I've used this backup copy to do restores, and it's really as simple as plugging in the iPod, using gpg to descrypt the file, piping that into 'tar xvzf -' to re-create my $HOME. I can move all my stuff back to where it needs to be after that.
(For those who wonder: I always make an encrypted backup file in case my iPod is ever lost or stolen. Sure, the bad guy can probably run something to brute force the passphrase, if that's something he's interested in doing, but it's a tough passphrase. I don't worry about it so much, and it's "only" email and family photos.)
... A series of miniature prisms and you could direct the light to different strips of PV cells. This would capture both ranges of light.
At the same time, you have reduced the intensity of the light. Better to set up two sets of PV cells, side-by-side, if you want to yield energy from both ranges of light.
I did some research work when I was a physics student, and I took data for a bunch of researchers at the National Renewable Energy Labs back in the mid-nineties. My specific project was working with a new CdTe based thin-film material to be used in solar cells. It was so easy to deposit on glass substrates that we referred to it as "painting the glass." This made it very easy to mass produce.
However, the new material mentioned in TFA is very different from that. The material I worked with only derived energy from visible light - this material works in the IR bands, and I find that even more interesting as it's vastly under-explored. I'm not so sure about his "weaving it into fabrics" idea, but for sure it will help boost traditional solar cell (PV) gain.
very important... and a lot of people don't really get why... anyone who bitches about his gpl'd program being used by the military to suppress indigenous tribes with fails to appreciate that vital freedom. It's double edged and you have to fully appreciate this. If your conscience can't cope with it, then don't release it under an open source license. Use your own license to tie it down so that you can deny them the use of your program.
Emphasis mine, above.
I'm afraid you are under a common mis-understanding between "free" and "open source". At its very essense, the term "open source" simply requires that you have access to the source code. "Free" (and specifically your use of "GPL'd") means that you have access to the source code, and that it meets the 4 essentials for "Free software".
You can choose to limit the distribution/use of your software, and still distribute the source code. For example, when Caldera released OpenDOS, they did so under an "open source" license. You could view the source code, but you were not permitted to do anything with it. In contrast, FreeDOS (or Linux) is completely free and GPL'd - you can choose to install it to run an arcade game or a baby-grinding machine if you needed to. We don't care.
So Slashdot, let's hear how you were lured into the digital life. What was it that drew you to a life of programming? How old were you when you first used a computer?
..the memories come flooding back..
Back when I was in 4th grade, my dad bought us a Franklin Ace 1000 - this was the first clone of the Apple II, and came with a 360k floppy. It was great! I did what most of us probably did with our first computer - I wrote a "guess the number" game in AppleBASIC.:-)
Over time, I got better at simple game programming. One game I made for myself was an adventure-style game along the lines of 'search for the magic item' and 'monsters may attack you as you enter an area'. Friends at school tried to get me interested in D&D, but I just saw it as a rule system for my computer game.
Later, I started to learn more about the GR and HGR graphics system on the Apple/Franklin. When War Games came out, I convinced myself I could write a war simulator that was more or less like the one in the movie. It looked great, but you could only target a few cities (and it was case sensitive - gah!) so it wasn't much fun to play.
I remember we eventually got an 8088 IBM-PC compatible clone, and how impressed I was that it had dual 360k floppy drives and a 5MB "hard card." This was originally intended for my mom and dad to do work-like stuff at home (spreadsheets, word processing) but my brother and I eventually found a few games we could run. (Anyone remember Sopwith?)
And I started the FreeDOS Project in 1994, while I was a physics student. But at the time, computers were just a hobby for me.
Heh, but I didn't even get interested in computers as a career until my 3rd year at university. Internships for physics students were hard to find that year, so I got a job doing some programming at a local small company. After graduation, I went back to that company to do system administration, and maybe a little programming.
I'm having trouble finding convenient, simple tools that promote the fundamental tenets of programming, allowing newbies to jump in and see immediate results, without getting bogged down in corporate-centric APIs. It seems nowadays most programmers end up spending more time learning the development environment (and thus being confined to specific platforms) than core, transferrable programming knowledge. I'd like to ask my fellow Slashdot dwellers what tools, languages and approaches they have used to help introduce new people to programming?
At the risk of sounding like a plug, you may be interested in GNU Robots. You write a program for a little robot, and set him loose in a maze. The robot must use only its program to be able to detect and pick up items (food adds to your energy, and prizes add to your score) while avoiding baddies that can do damage to you.
Disclaimer: I wrote the original version of GNU Robots, but it's been in someone else's hands since 2000.
The robot programming language is in Scheme. The robot primitives are fairly easy to use, so if you help your child understand how to use the primitives and then gloss over the "tail recursion" concept (think of it like GOTO) then your child will be ready to write GNU Robots programs within a short time, and can watch his or her own robot start to navigate the maze.
As your child becomes more familiar with Scheme, he or she can write more complex GNU Robots programs. For example, the robot could keep track of where it's been, so it doesn't need to rescan an area it's been to before.
I like the tagline at the end of the article: Next week: "San Andreas made me have relations with the neighbour's dog.":-)
Games can inspire you to do things, sure. I remember a story on Eidos's web site about a guy who was inspired to try mountain-climbing and kayaking because he played 'Tomb Raider'. But saying "Tomb Raider inspired me to be more active" and "GTA:SA inspired me to do a criminal act" seem kind of far apart. I have trouble with people "blaming" a game for the bad things they do.
Yes, what you are thinking of is the
Belkin iPod Media Reader: back up digital images to your iPod, and take them with you on the road. Your iPod's abundant storage handles thousands of digital photos and frees up your camera's disk space so you can take more pictures. Simply connect the Belkin Media Reader to your iPod, and insert any of the six supported media types. Using software support that's already built into your iPod (with software version 2.1 or later), transfer the pictures quickly via FireWire technology and you're ready to start shooting again. When you get home, simply connect your iPod to your computer to retrieve the images.
I'm OT, but if you're going to compile a list like that, and leave off Chipwits, then either you missed out on one of the great Mac games of the 1980's or you need to turn in your Mac geek card.
Chipwits was great! You construct a program for a little robot by laying out "chips" with different instructions (move forward, turn left, pick up item, scan ahead,...) and wire them together with T/F gates. Then, you set the little bot loose in a maze for him to explore. Blindingly simple to do, extremely difficult to do well.
Chipwits was a very addicting game. Mike Johnston (co-creator) was supposed to be releasing an update for Windows/MacOSX, but I haven't seen anything yet.
Closest you'll probably get to the original Chipwits is GNU Robots. (Disclaimer: I'm the original author of GNU Robots, but I handed that off years ago... looks like someone has picked it up again!)
Included all the same annoyances ("Oh, I finished a mission in X-Wing! Quick, quit out and back up my pilot file before trying another mission!")
Ah, I remember that little "feature" of the game. For those of you who don't know the game: if you lost your ship during the next battle, the game would determine if the Rebels won or lost, and you would get picked up by the "winner". If the Empire picked you up, you went to a detention camp.
I also remember that you could pick wingmen to go with you. Ideally, these were other pilot savegames... I remember the happy day when I found that someone had created hacked savegames. One pilot was prone to use missiles, another was prone to shooting all the damn time, another was very good at dodging. It added a lot to the gaming experience to pick from this group of hacked pilots to be your backup, or to fly the bombing runs (while you flew cover), etc. It was great!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm on the StarOffice 8 beta program ... anyone know if this version is vulnerable on Linux? I assume so, since it's based on an OOo 2.0 beta build.
RHEL have recommended CentOS in the mailing list if you need an enterpise system and you or your company can't afford $345 a year. I guess that says alot about it.
And if your company can't afford or won't pay $345 a year for an enterprise system, that says a lot about the company.
I wonder if this means Novell is any closer to releasing a Novell Netware Client for Linux? In our shop, lots of people use Fedora Core 1,2,3 - but everyone needs to have access to files on the Novell Netware LAN. Scripts that use NCPFS get us there, but it's kind of a hack (i.e. you need to change the script if we change the server, ...)
Releasing a full Novell Netware Client for Linux has been a planned thing for some time. Maybe NLD 10 will finally get us there?
Kare's web site has a link to the Moof Icon store on cafepress. You can buy tshirts and such with the dogcow on them! :-)
No buttons, though ... I'd like to have a bunch of dogcow buttons for my next meeting (lots of Mac users there, it would be fun to hand them out.)
If you like icons, you may also want to check out Jimmac's ikony. You've probably seen a lot of his icons already, if you use GNOME. Really great stuff!
Ok, I will freely admit to working for a University, and not the private sector. Are certifications really held in such high regard out there? I know here they mean squat ...
That doesn't apply everywhere, son. I also work for a University (part of Big-10) in the enterprise support area, and I just recently hired a Linux Admin. RHCE was something we looked for in our candidates - we have already standardized on Red Hat Linux, so RHCE certainly applies. I won't say it's a deciding factor, but those who listed RHCE (or even RHCT) on their resume were automatically someone we became more interested in.
I suppose it's something else to get your foot in the door.
Another semi-obvious possible use would be to utilize similar technology to make operating a mouse on a train (or other bumpy ride) less error-prone.
I often boot my laptop during my bus commute home (30 minutes) to catch up on email, etc. Since the ride is kind of bumpy sometimes, I just turn down the "speed" of the mouse. Makes it less error-prone at the expense of taking longer to navigate menus, etc.
Not at all, for some situations. In the serious data center or enterprise support group, you're right - 6months is way too short. My group supports enterprise applications, and we only use RHEL because of the long product lifecycle.
But for some smaller departments who just want to set up a web site - quick - to display data or establish a shadow system that the enterprise folks don't want to support, I can see how Fedora is a good choice for them. The price tag is right, and it's quick to set up.
For personal web sites, I can also see how Fedora is a good choice. But not for hosting companies, for example.
I guess it all comes down to what you are going to do with it, and how "serious" you are about supporting the platform over the long-term.
IIRC, the UK does something like this for movies. I would have preferred a numerical-based rating system for games in the US, anyway. It is much easier for a parent to see "13+" and know that little 8-year-old Timmy probably shouldn't play that game.
>>Can't their web server just reject or redirect any page requests that don't have a referrer field of their own web site?
>Yeah, I'd have thought so. It might confuse tinfoil hat types though, or some proxies, who refuse to send referrers because the Orbitz site would break. You could, of course, use "no referrer and no session cookie" but the tinfoil hats aren't going to use cookies either.
Tin foil hat types who disallow cookies are probably a small percentage of the folks who will use Orbitz. While I hate sites that force cookies or referrers, I'd much prefer they take the technical route and do that rather than this silly "no deep linking to us or we'll C&D your ass" nonsense.
I'll probably get modded down as flamebait, but I'm no longer looking forward to GT4. It's been hyped for so long, but delayed several times, and had features taken out. This is getting old for me. I've already moved on.
I am particularly interested in the modern dance, thinking that this is probably a better approach of studying oscillations than the springs that I used when I was in college.
/self imagines the Micheal Flatley 'Lord of the Dance'-style in teaching physics. :-)
I have a 20GB iPod, but only about 12GB is used. My $HOME is about 2GB, including a bunch of digital photos, but also a bunch of documents, my email, and other stuff I'd rather not lose.
My solution is simple:
This is a very simple shell script that deletes the backup file already on the iPod, then does a 'tar czf - $HOME' and pipes it into gpg using circular encryption (that is, a passphrase.) The encrypted, compressed tarball (about 1.7GB) is written directly to the iPod. Takes about 20 minutes.
I've used this backup copy to do restores, and it's really as simple as plugging in the iPod, using gpg to descrypt the file, piping that into 'tar xvzf -' to re-create my $HOME. I can move all my stuff back to where it needs to be after that.
(For those who wonder: I always make an encrypted backup file in case my iPod is ever lost or stolen. Sure, the bad guy can probably run something to brute force the passphrase, if that's something he's interested in doing, but it's a tough passphrase. I don't worry about it so much, and it's "only" email and family photos.)
At the same time, you have reduced the intensity of the light. Better to set up two sets of PV cells, side-by-side, if you want to yield energy from both ranges of light.
I did some research work when I was a physics student, and I took data for a bunch of researchers at the National Renewable Energy Labs back in the mid-nineties. My specific project was working with a new CdTe based thin-film material to be used in solar cells. It was so easy to deposit on glass substrates that we referred to it as "painting the glass." This made it very easy to mass produce.
However, the new material mentioned in TFA is very different from that. The material I worked with only derived energy from visible light - this material works in the IR bands, and I find that even more interesting as it's vastly under-explored. I'm not so sure about his "weaving it into fabrics" idea, but for sure it will help boost traditional solar cell (PV) gain.
very important... and a lot of people don't really get why... anyone who bitches about his gpl'd program being used by the military to suppress indigenous tribes with fails to appreciate that vital freedom. It's double edged and you have to fully appreciate this. If your conscience can't cope with it, then don't release it under an open source license. Use your own license to tie it down so that you can deny them the use of your program.
Emphasis mine, above.
I'm afraid you are under a common mis-understanding between "free" and "open source". At its very essense, the term "open source" simply requires that you have access to the source code. "Free" (and specifically your use of "GPL'd") means that you have access to the source code, and that it meets the 4 essentials for "Free software".
You can choose to limit the distribution/use of your software, and still distribute the source code. For example, when Caldera released OpenDOS, they did so under an "open source" license. You could view the source code, but you were not permitted to do anything with it. In contrast, FreeDOS (or Linux) is completely free and GPL'd - you can choose to install it to run an arcade game or a baby-grinding machine if you needed to. We don't care.
So Slashdot, let's hear how you were lured into the digital life. What was it that drew you to a life of programming? How old were you when you first used a computer?
..the memories come flooding back..
Back when I was in 4th grade, my dad bought us a Franklin Ace 1000 - this was the first clone of the Apple II, and came with a 360k floppy. It was great! I did what most of us probably did with our first computer - I wrote a "guess the number" game in AppleBASIC. :-)
Over time, I got better at simple game programming. One game I made for myself was an adventure-style game along the lines of 'search for the magic item' and 'monsters may attack you as you enter an area'. Friends at school tried to get me interested in D&D, but I just saw it as a rule system for my computer game.
Later, I started to learn more about the GR and HGR graphics system on the Apple/Franklin. When War Games came out, I convinced myself I could write a war simulator that was more or less like the one in the movie. It looked great, but you could only target a few cities (and it was case sensitive - gah!) so it wasn't much fun to play.
I remember we eventually got an 8088 IBM-PC compatible clone, and how impressed I was that it had dual 360k floppy drives and a 5MB "hard card." This was originally intended for my mom and dad to do work-like stuff at home (spreadsheets, word processing) but my brother and I eventually found a few games we could run. (Anyone remember Sopwith?)
And I started the FreeDOS Project in 1994, while I was a physics student. But at the time, computers were just a hobby for me.
Heh, but I didn't even get interested in computers as a career until my 3rd year at university. Internships for physics students were hard to find that year, so I got a job doing some programming at a local small company. After graduation, I went back to that company to do system administration, and maybe a little programming.
..and the rest is history?
I'm having trouble finding convenient, simple tools that promote the fundamental tenets of programming, allowing newbies to jump in and see immediate results, without getting bogged down in corporate-centric APIs. It seems nowadays most programmers end up spending more time learning the development environment (and thus being confined to specific platforms) than core, transferrable programming knowledge. I'd like to ask my fellow Slashdot dwellers what tools, languages and approaches they have used to help introduce new people to programming?
At the risk of sounding like a plug, you may be interested in GNU Robots. You write a program for a little robot, and set him loose in a maze. The robot must use only its program to be able to detect and pick up items (food adds to your energy, and prizes add to your score) while avoiding baddies that can do damage to you. Disclaimer: I wrote the original version of GNU Robots, but it's been in someone else's hands since 2000.
The robot programming language is in Scheme. The robot primitives are fairly easy to use, so if you help your child understand how to use the primitives and then gloss over the "tail recursion" concept (think of it like GOTO) then your child will be ready to write GNU Robots programs within a short time, and can watch his or her own robot start to navigate the maze.
As your child becomes more familiar with Scheme, he or she can write more complex GNU Robots programs. For example, the robot could keep track of where it's been, so it doesn't need to rescan an area it's been to before.
Just an idea.
Whoops, my bad. Got my binary math wrong.
Yes, they had to have used a signed 16-bit integer counter. A little background for those who may not know how to count in binary:
If you know your binary, you know you can actually store a number of about twice that if you fill all the zeroes with ones:
But, if that's a signed integer, you'll need to reserve a position for +/-, leaving only fifteen binary places for the integer.
So as soon as the Comair system needed to count 32768 flight crew changes for that month, it crashed. It counted -0, or zero.
-jh
I like the tagline at the end of the article: Next week: "San Andreas made me have relations with the neighbour's dog." :-)
Games can inspire you to do things, sure. I remember a story on Eidos's web site about a guy who was inspired to try mountain-climbing and kayaking because he played 'Tomb Raider'. But saying "Tomb Raider inspired me to be more active" and "GTA:SA inspired me to do a criminal act" seem kind of far apart. I have trouble with people "blaming" a game for the bad things they do.
Yes, what you are thinking of is the Belkin iPod Media Reader: back up digital images to your iPod, and take them with you on the road. Your iPod's abundant storage handles thousands of digital photos and frees up your camera's disk space so you can take more pictures. Simply connect the Belkin Media Reader to your iPod, and insert any of the six supported media types. Using software support that's already built into your iPod (with software version 2.1 or later), transfer the pictures quickly via FireWire technology and you're ready to start shooting again. When you get home, simply connect your iPod to your computer to retrieve the images.
Doesn't support iPod Mini (only 4GB anyway.)
I'm OT, but if you're going to compile a list like that, and leave off Chipwits, then either you missed out on one of the great Mac games of the 1980's or you need to turn in your Mac geek card.
Chipwits was great! You construct a program for a little robot by laying out "chips" with different instructions (move forward, turn left, pick up item, scan ahead, ...) and wire them together with T/F gates. Then, you set the little bot loose in a maze for him to explore. Blindingly simple to do, extremely difficult to do well.
Chipwits was a very addicting game. Mike Johnston (co-creator) was supposed to be releasing an update for Windows/MacOSX, but I haven't seen anything yet.
Closest you'll probably get to the original Chipwits is GNU Robots. (Disclaimer: I'm the original author of GNU Robots, but I handed that off years ago... looks like someone has picked it up again!)
Included all the same annoyances ("Oh, I finished a mission in X-Wing! Quick, quit out and back up my pilot file before trying another mission!")
Ah, I remember that little "feature" of the game. For those of you who don't know the game: if you lost your ship during the next battle, the game would determine if the Rebels won or lost, and you would get picked up by the "winner". If the Empire picked you up, you went to a detention camp.
I also remember that you could pick wingmen to go with you. Ideally, these were other pilot savegames ... I remember the happy day when I found that someone had created hacked savegames. One pilot was prone to use missiles, another was prone to shooting all the damn time, another was very good at dodging. It added a lot to the gaming experience to pick from this group of hacked pilots to be your backup, or to fly the bombing runs (while you flew cover), etc. It was great!
Similarly the first time I read LOTR, I wanted to be one of the Fellowship, and had there been a game around back then, it would have been great.
Allow me to introduce you to Dungeons & Dragons ...