I've always wondered why urban places end up without local backup for infrastructure needs like power.
In my home town (pop. 325) the power often goes out in the winter. When it does, most of the time they get the big old diesel generator up and running and the town has power again within an hour or so. Day-long blackouts are really rare, even if it takes them that long to find and fix the downed line.
Is there some reason why cities can't have relatively local (say, block by block) emergency backup for things like power?
Or is it just habit, or maybe just being cheap?
I doubt the folks in Downieville have more money than the folks in [big city of your choice].
I always wondered: if you had a huge wireless power grid, how do we know it wouldn't be harmfull to people to live beneath the airborne electric currents?
I never got around taking physics... but I bet a lot of people on slashdot did and someone can provide me with a clue.;-)
When I was at school (CSU Chico) around '91 a guy came and gave a slide lecture at the art department about a setup almost exactly like what you describe.
I can't remember enough of the details to guess whether it's the same house (the guy was 50 or 60ish when he gave the lecture). One point I do remember: he didn't actually own the land. He was basically squatting with permission - he had asked the landowner and the owner didn't mind, in fact thought it was pretty cool.
As impressive as it all is, I wonder how practical such a structure is if you don't get so much sunlight for solar.
Taking a box offline may not be an option in a lot of environments, but I can think of several cases in which this would be very useful.
Small/home/project server
One of my private servers was taken over once. Very un-nice thing, resulting in several months of frustrating interaction with network provider until we figured out we'd been rootkitted. We reinstalled everything from scratch and did our best to lock it down, but it still would have been nice to have a handy forensics tool to pop on the 'doze box down the hall.
Intranet server
If you have a server on your intranet and you want to run checks on it (say, to make sure you're safe against malicious/disgruntled employees in the billing department), you can pretty easily have a few hours of scheduled downtime at night.
Multiple identical servers
I worked at a company that had a number of identically-configured web boxes. That was the whole point: you could take one out whenever you liked. Since the config was identical, you could take one out, run whatever tests you wanted, and if you found a problem you could fix the servers in rotation.
Clueless company
If you work for someone who has no real sysadmin, and they sometimes expect you to do sysadmin-like things, it could be very nice to have such a MiniCD handy. If that's the case you probably don't have a forensics-kit laptop handy, nor expensive tools.
I think the parent poster means something a little more like the way the Cygwin installer works, not just the option to roll your own if you know what you're doing.
I agree that would be super cool. I've thought about rolling my own with Morphix, aimed at apache/perl/postgres development with minimal CD access (ie, cooler laptop). But it seems like a big project and I haven't got time.
So, Dark Lord Seth, here is your opportunity for fame and/or Profit!
Make such a critter.
Better yet, make the "Custom Live Linux Maker" live on a miniCD itself, fetching the required packages from Debian or wherever, storing everything in an approved space on the local HD, and burning a nice CD at the end.
Warning: fsockopen(): unable to connect to 127.0.0.1:9182 (Connection refused) in/home/ian/whittlebit.com/wqserver.php on line 13
Connection to WQServer failed
/.ed already...
*sigh* maybe I can test it later.
As an aside, I find it a bit annoying that it uses frames and that the query input is readonly when you have (or would have had) a results page, so you can't enter new terms then click "New Search." Since it uses Javascript anyway, that would have been easy enough.
I've heard it argued that spam as such is utterly ineffective, but that spammers are effective at getting people to pay them to send spam.
That assumption doesn't lead to a bright future either, though, because there are plenty of schmucks out there for whom a promise of "ten million e-mails delivered in one day" or somesuch is irresistible.
I personally suspect there actually are a lot of people from outside the Slashdot Universe who actually click/call/whatever in response to spam. How many there are will probably always be a mystery, since spammers and their customers are not exactly going to publish accurate stats.
As for a "do not spam" registry, that couldn't really work with the internet as we know it. I think there will be more and more technological solutions offered, and the battle will rage on.
Back when I used to get spam, I got about 100-150 a day. It took me about 10 or 15 minutes of actually going through the mailbox checking and hitting DEL to clean it out.
The bummer was that if I got behind, it would seem like an enormous amount, and I'd put off going through my inbox at all. That, of course, was a bigger productivity loss.
If we say someone takes half an hour a day to both clean out the spam and grumble about it, we might guestimate the annual productivity loss something like:
$ 15 (Worker cost/ 1/2hr) x 225 (Work days/year) ------ $ 3375 / year
...which sounds very high. On the other hand, my gut feeling is that the 1/2 hour isn't an overestimate for average workers (who only cost the company $30/hour total).
If you just ask people how much time they spend dealing with spam you'll get wildly unreliable answers, depending on how they think their answer will be interpreted.
In any case I'm convinced the productivity cost dwarfs the infrastructure cost. I just haven't (yet) seen any statistics I'd call definitive.
it's surprising that nobody else is marketing cheap PCs using Knoppix or a similar distribution.
Here in Hungary, they most definitely are marketing cheap PCs with Linux.
You can get several different flavors at one of the big consumer electronics stores in Budapest, and a lot of the smaller computer shops are offering Linux preinstalled. The offers are clearly aimed at high-school and college students.
Meanwhile the government is spending a lot of money on advertising and infrastructure to get the young'uns to surf the net more (and so on). They seem to have figured out that there's going to be a lot of competition in the tech labor market among the new EU members next year.
I think it's only a (short) matter of time before someone here comes up with a US$200 PC with Linux and a monitor.
I too was wondering about the 6 hours, but then I remembered that people don't just sit in front of the radio and stare at it while listening.
So now we're down to 4.5 hours. As another poster pointed out, lots of kids have the TV on as background, paying attention sometimes but not always, as they socialize and/or do other things.
When I was that age, before I gave up TV, I spent about that much time each day in front of the idiot box, sometimes also doing homework.
Sounds "normal" enough to me, and I'm glad they're surfing the web, because that at least is somewhat interactive and more diverse.
Part of the problem, at least in the USA, is that many companies do very extensive lobbying to get government contracts.
This gets built into the price of course, and includes the normal range of influence-buying activities.
It's very hard for Free Software groups to compete with that, since it's a capital-intensive game and the proprietary camp has a big head start in terms of relationships, legacy ware, etc.
I think it would be interesting to specifically focus on individual elected officials responsible for specific government contracts. When, for example, California is essentially bankrupt, we Californians should be able to make a political issue out of how much even some obscure agency pays for its software, and what residual good it does the state's citizens.
Last time I checked Hotline, which was about a year ago, it seemed there were all these Warez servers out there, often actually charging money for access.
They all had extensive disclaimers and anti-law-enforcement statements you had to click-through "agree" to before you could even browse the file lists.
In short, "No cops allowed; these servers are for backups of licensed software only; you are only allowed to download what you have licenses for; etc."
I wonder first whether this sort of thing has any legal value, and if so whether it could be used in other P2P contexts.
IANAL and maybe I'm just dumb, but it seems like prosecuting someone who had such a disclaimer would require arguing against the validity of click-through agreements, which would be against the interests of certain folks much bigger than the RIAA.
I knew somebody who was doing this with bootleg recordings.
They weren't MP3, they used lossless compression (the recordings were carefully done high-quality DAT mixed and burned to CDs).
He and his friends just ran FTP servers on their Linuxboxen, with no anonymous access. (Yeah, pretty geeky, but they all had their own servers on their DSL connections).
Make that sFTP and you've got a very pivate file sharing network.
Slashdot Mirror
lvng thtr now
[SEND TO MANY]
I'm no expert on software licenses, but I do wonder:
Is any popular open-source software licensed in such a way that the creator could revoke someone's license?
If so nobody in their right mind would use such software for anything important, since the permission to use it could be revoked on a whim.
On the other hand, SCO probably doesn't read the licenses...
...do not deserve the Hits.
What, you mean they don't deserve a slashdotting?
I've always wondered why urban places end up without local backup for infrastructure needs like power.
In my home town (pop. 325) the power often goes out in the winter. When it does, most of the time they get the big old diesel generator up and running and the town has power again within an hour or so. Day-long blackouts are really rare, even if it takes them that long to find and fix the downed line.
Is there some reason why cities can't have relatively local (say, block by block) emergency backup for things like power?
Or is it just habit, or maybe just being cheap?
I doubt the folks in Downieville have more money than the folks in [big city of your choice].
I know you probably just meant it as an example, but I'm curious.
Do you know of any newspapers etc in Iraq using their newfound freedom of the press to get their point of view out on the net? Maybe even in English?
I always wondered: if you had a huge wireless power grid, how do we know it wouldn't be harmfull to people to live beneath the airborne electric currents?
;-)
I never got around taking physics... but I bet a lot of people on slashdot did and someone can provide me with a clue.
When I was at school (CSU Chico) around '91 a guy came and gave a slide lecture at the art department about a setup almost exactly like what you describe.
I can't remember enough of the details to guess whether it's the same house (the guy was 50 or 60ish when he gave the lecture). One point I do remember: he didn't actually own the land. He was basically squatting with permission - he had asked the landowner and the owner didn't mind, in fact thought it was pretty cool.
As impressive as it all is, I wonder how practical such a structure is if you don't get so much sunlight for solar.
You have 20 seconds to comply!
</obligatory robocop quote>
Taking a box offline may not be an option in a lot of environments, but I can think of several cases in which this would be very useful.
One of my private servers was taken over once. Very un-nice thing, resulting in several months of frustrating interaction with network provider until we figured out we'd been rootkitted. We reinstalled everything from scratch and did our best to lock it down, but it still would have been nice to have a handy forensics tool to pop on the 'doze box down the hall.
If you have a server on your intranet and you want to run checks on it (say, to make sure you're safe against malicious/disgruntled employees in the billing department), you can pretty easily have a few hours of scheduled downtime at night.
I worked at a company that had a number of identically-configured web boxes. That was the whole point: you could take one out whenever you liked. Since the config was identical, you could take one out, run whatever tests you wanted, and if you found a problem you could fix the servers in rotation.
If you work for someone who has no real sysadmin, and they sometimes expect you to do sysadmin-like things, it could be very nice to have such a MiniCD handy. If that's the case you probably don't have a forensics-kit laptop handy, nor expensive tools.
Of course, always get permission first.
I think the parent poster means something a little more like the way the Cygwin installer works, not just the option to roll your own if you know what you're doing.
I agree that would be super cool. I've thought about rolling my own with Morphix, aimed at apache/perl/postgres development with minimal CD access (ie, cooler laptop). But it seems like a big project and I haven't got time.
So, Dark Lord Seth, here is your opportunity for fame and/or Profit!
Make such a critter.
Better yet, make the "Custom Live Linux Maker" live on a miniCD itself, fetching the required packages from Debian or wherever, storing everything in an approved space on the local HD, and burning a nice CD at the end.
*sigh* maybe I can test it later.
As an aside, I find it a bit annoying that it uses frames and that the query input is readonly when you have (or would have had) a results page, so you can't enter new terms then click "New Search." Since it uses Javascript anyway, that would have been easy enough.
No no, it's TRUE, but it was called "Spike TV."
Funny, in the early days of spam I did the same thing, even though I knew plenty about spam.
If I could track down the responsible party I would send a very professional yet very nasty message.
I knew it was pointless, but I felt a little better afterward.
*sigh* those were the days...
This is a classic question.
I've heard it argued that spam as such is utterly ineffective, but that spammers are effective at getting people to pay them to send spam.
That assumption doesn't lead to a bright future either, though, because there are plenty of schmucks out there for whom a promise of "ten million e-mails delivered in one day" or somesuch is irresistible.
I personally suspect there actually are a lot of people from outside the Slashdot Universe who actually click/call/whatever in response to spam. How many there are will probably always be a mystery, since spammers and their customers are not exactly going to publish accurate stats.
As for a "do not spam" registry, that couldn't really work with the internet as we know it. I think there will be more and more technological solutions offered, and the battle will rage on.
Back when I used to get spam, I got about 100-150 a day. It took me about 10 or 15 minutes of actually going through the mailbox checking and hitting DEL to clean it out.
The bummer was that if I got behind, it would seem like an enormous amount, and I'd put off going through my inbox at all. That, of course, was a bigger productivity loss.
If we say someone takes half an hour a day to both clean out the spam and grumble about it, we might guestimate the annual productivity loss something like:...which sounds very high. On the other hand, my gut feeling is that the 1/2 hour isn't an overestimate for average workers (who only cost the company $30/hour total).
If you just ask people how much time they spend dealing with spam you'll get wildly unreliable answers, depending on how they think their answer will be interpreted.
In any case I'm convinced the productivity cost dwarfs the infrastructure cost. I just haven't (yet) seen any statistics I'd call definitive.
it's surprising that nobody else is marketing cheap PCs using Knoppix or a similar distribution.
Here in Hungary, they most definitely are marketing cheap PCs with Linux.
You can get several different flavors at one of the big consumer electronics stores in Budapest, and a lot of the smaller computer shops are offering Linux preinstalled. The offers are clearly aimed at high-school and college students.
Meanwhile the government is spending a lot of money on advertising and infrastructure to get the young'uns to surf the net more (and so on). They seem to have figured out that there's going to be a lot of competition in the tech labor market among the new EU members next year.
I think it's only a (short) matter of time before someone here comes up with a US$200 PC with Linux and a monitor.
I too was wondering about the 6 hours, but then I remembered that people don't just sit in front of the radio and stare at it while listening.
So now we're down to 4.5 hours. As another poster pointed out, lots of kids have the TV on as background, paying attention sometimes but not always, as they socialize and/or do other things.
When I was that age, before I gave up TV, I spent about that much time each day in front of the idiot box, sometimes also doing homework.
Sounds "normal" enough to me, and I'm glad they're surfing the web, because that at least is somewhat interactive and more diverse.
Part of the problem, at least in the USA, is that many companies do very extensive lobbying to get government contracts.
This gets built into the price of course, and includes the normal range of influence-buying activities.
It's very hard for Free Software groups to compete with that, since it's a capital-intensive game and the proprietary camp has a big head start in terms of relationships, legacy ware, etc.
I think it would be interesting to specifically focus on individual elected officials responsible for specific government contracts. When, for example, California is essentially bankrupt, we Californians should be able to make a political issue out of how much even some obscure agency pays for its software, and what residual good it does the state's citizens.
Anybody know of a coordinated effort to do this?
Would I be in violation of the DMCA if I then removed the padding to make the document readable?
Last time I checked Hotline, which was about a year ago, it seemed there were all these Warez servers out there, often actually charging money for access.
They all had extensive disclaimers and anti-law-enforcement statements you had to click-through "agree" to before you could even browse the file lists.
In short, "No cops allowed; these servers are for backups of licensed software only; you are only allowed to download what you have licenses for; etc."
I wonder first whether this sort of thing has any legal value, and if so whether it could be used in other P2P contexts.
IANAL and maybe I'm just dumb, but it seems like prosecuting someone who had such a disclaimer would require arguing against the validity of click-through agreements, which would be against the interests of certain folks much bigger than the RIAA.
I knew somebody who was doing this with bootleg recordings.
They weren't MP3, they used lossless compression (the recordings were carefully done high-quality DAT mixed and burned to CDs).
He and his friends just ran FTP servers on their Linuxboxen, with no anonymous access. (Yeah, pretty geeky, but they all had their own servers on their DSL connections).
Make that sFTP and you've got a very pivate file sharing network.
Of course you have to trust your friends...
Or populate it your own original warbling renditions of Britney et al.
You might have to show up in court but the comedy would be priceless and, of course, you could counter-sue the RIAA for violating your civil rights.
Parody lives.
Yes, the poems actually have sex.
For a second there, I thought it said the poets.
Maybe you should try Kazoo Lite K++.