Can't you have your log system send you an email every day with all abnormal entries? It's a bit of work to define "normal" initially, but it's generally not complicated -- 95% of your logs are going to be entries about access from authorized users on authorized networks doing a small number of authorized things, and those are pretty easy to filter even with something as simple as awk (and trivial with more advanced tools).
Start with that remaining 5% and whittle it down bit-by-bit until the daily report is small enough to actually read every day. Because if you're not reading your logs on a regular, timely basis they're essentially useless for anything other than post-mortem analysis.
What good are your automation tools if they don't work as expected? Didn't you test them before deploying them?
Sure, it's probably good to manually compare the output of the monitoring tools to the verbose logs once in a while, but unless you've got really bad automation that should be nothing more than an infrequent formality on historical data -- the day-to-day monitoring should all by done by tools that don't get bored by the thousands of nominal log entires.
I don't know about you, but I'd consider many kinds of porn very educational, and a few even research-worthy. But then again I don't understand what all this "the boobies will damage my childrens" ranting is about anyway, or why it only applies between 3 and 18, but not between birth and 3 or 18 and death.
Beyond that I generally agree with your second point -- in-class use is probably a bad idea unless there's an actual active use for the systems. But there's no need for a technological solution to that problem; you could just have the students put their laptops under their desks whenever there isn't a reason to have them out. It seems to work just fine for books, cell phones, lipstick and all sorts of other potentially distracting items that are commonly brought into classrooms.
I'd be willing to pay more in property tax to live in a school district that simply avoided all federal funding and the stupid restrictions that go with it. I know no one likes taxes, but I'd rather have less money and more freedom than the other way around It's not even like the federal government provides huge amounts of money to schools -- the average is like 7% -- so I don't know why anyone puts up with this "free" money in the first place. It reminds me a little of taking a "free" loan from your father-in-law -- the financial terms might look good, but the overall price is far too high.
In general I agree -- we oppress students much more than is justified -- but it's silly to speak as though the rights granted (or reserved, depending on your point of view) by first amendment were absolute and without exception.
First, we've generally accepted that minors don't have the same rights as adults, constitutional or otherwise; many rights are extended to children through their parents -- their parents have the right to travel freely and can allow their children to do the same -- but children themselves cannot simply set off cross-country without the consent of their guardian(s). The constitution doesn't say anything in particular about this, but it's been accepted as law since well before the constitution was drafted.
Second, the first amendment only extends insofar as your actions do not impede the rights or immediate safety of others. There's that whole "yell fire...theater" bit you might recall. Or your right to play music at 110 dB, but only until 9 PM (or whenever you local noise ordinance kicks in).
I don't understand how buying a "linux laptop" -- whatever that is -- makes the processor, architecture or performance any better 6 year later; in my experience any 6-year-old laptop is pretty hard to use, no matter what OS shipped with it.
Now a laptop running linux might save you money on software upgrades,should you choose to buy them, but let's not even pretend that A) an educational institution with hundreds or thousands of licenses is paying retail prices OS updates (in my actual experience in that situation it's more like $20/machine-year even if you always want the latest and greatest) or B) that the same institution wouldn't be paying RedHat a huge sum annually to provide "support" every system they're running.
But it was OS 9 so that wasn't much. I really find it hard to believe/anyone/ used macs before OS X.
Not that I disagree -- when it was OS 9 vs. W2K Apple was looking pretty anemic in a lot of ways. But remember that people used Windows (and DOS) before NT; compared to that OS 9 seems like a blessing.
Most linux users -- even talented ones -- rarely do anything to their system files other than apply vendor-created packages. For most people the idea of replacing system libraries with non-standard versions is almost unthinkable; if they wanted some other functionality they'd switch distros, not replace standard system files.
Fair use lets me make copies of any copyrighted work to which I have legitimate access, regardless of the license, at least in certain circumstances. Personal use on alternate media is one of those circumstances.
The only legal violation is removing DRM, which isn't a copyright issue but a problem with the DMCA, and one that many people have asked to be made an official exemption.
Yes. It can update NVRAM settings from various control panels.
I've never been able to figure out why I have to reboot and poke through some silly BIOS configuration screen to select a startup disk, change the power settings/timer, or enable/disable WoL on WinTel machines. I mean, I can set the clock from inside the OS, and that's BIOS-controlled data (at least between boots) -- why are other settings not accessible?
But it's still one less minute. If someone is going to spend 18 minutes/day browsing the Internet from work, what make you think a slow login would deduct from one of those minute and not one of the productive work minutes?
A £15 no-name player does not have comparable storage space to a £200, 120 GB iPod Classic. I'm sure there are some devices that do have as much storage, and they may well cost less than an iPod, but they aren't even close to £15.
And the iPod Touch is hardly in the same market as generic MP3 players. That's like saying that it's silly to buy a £350 Dell desktop instead of a £15 no-name PDA -- they devices aren't even comparable.
And if we were talking about data that needed to be transmitted low bitrates might be desirable. But given that 120 GB of music at 512 kbps is almost 23 days of continuous playback it seems pretty silly to quibble about it even on portable music players. No matter how good the codec, there's more information preserved at higher bitrates. And as you noted, at higher bitrates codecs have similar performance. So as long as you make reasonable bitrate choices the actual code shouldn't matter.
I'm not saying that OGG doesn't have advantages, I just don't know why you think anyone other than people committed to that patent-free political aspect would care; the technical arguments are pretty insignificant.
There IS such a thing as a T1 line. It's a specific type of carrier used to transmit digital data via biploar encoding. It can be used to provide services such as a 1.544 Mbps DS-1 point-to-point data connection.
Also, anyone who is licensed to lay communication lines can sell you the line (local loop) so you don't have to buy from the ILEC.
Also, remember, a "T1" or other DS-1 or similar link it is called is just a point-to-point connection. At the remote end of your link you'll need someone to terminate your service onto the Internet. IP routing abstracted over a serial layer abstracted over synchronous frames using all signaling channels is a typical solution, but there's really nothing to stop you from sending 24 simulated MODEM signals over the DS-0 PCM channels and letting the remote end decode back to analog and de-multiplex.
The fact that you're afraid that *you* might be criminally liable because someone you don't even know did something illegal with an Internet connection you happen to pay for is a sad comment on how far we let this "for the children" fascism dictate our lives. I'm not saying it's impossible to be prosecuted for the crimes of strangers who happened to be nearby -- your fear is not totally unfounded -- but it's not something you *should* have to worry about.
No one is afraid that leaving their car unlocked might make them criminally liable if the car was stolen and used in a crime, even a crime against children -- at best you're creating an attractive nuisance (if the thief is a child), and even that would be a stretch. You're probably not even worried that willfully lending your car to someone might result in criminal liability, unless you could reasonably foresee that they were going to commit a crime using your vehicle. But for some reason leaving your access point unprotected, or actively advertising it as available to strangers is a potential crime because they might do something illegal that you don't even know about.
It's worth noting that a significant portion of most land-line phone bills is various fees and taxes that will go away when you give up the dialtone -- Qwest charges extra for their "naked" line as well, and when you first look at it the price difference is not significant. But tack on the Universal Access Fee, e911 fee, and all the other sundry fees and taxes on dialtone service and it's actually quite a bit cheaper to drop the phone service.
I don't know that AT&T would be cheaper without a dialtone, I'm just saying it's important to note the non-trivial "other charges" section of the bill when you're comparing the price.
I'd be surprised if any hub Linksys ever sold contained a copy of any GNU tool in such a fashion that it would require distribution of the source.
Routers, firewalls, sure. Maybe even switches. But if you've got a modified glibc on your hub you're doing it wrong. Hub prices fell because the requisite hardware got cheaper, not because they used free tools.
I know you're joking, but you could just as easily say that copyright law is stifling innovation by preventing small, independent inventors from using the work of large American corporations without contributing in kind -- the law works both ways.
You claim that disk fragmentation decreased stability, but you didn't actually cite an example of decreased stability. All you said was that the data was fragmented and that after defragmenting it was no longer fragmented.
I call BS on you're "they all want Office 2007". They might all want Office 2003 -- I have yet to meet a user who liked Office 2007 on their new computer, and OpenOffice is arguably a closer match to Office 2003 in terms of user interface.
I didn't know that: A) "Indian" was a race (unless you meant the indigenous people of North America). As far as I know India is a country (or at best a sub-continent) and so discrimination toward Indians would be nationalism, not racism. B) That only Indians can be named Haji. Aren't you being racist by assuming that names are tied to race? C) That living someplace where the cost of living and common wages are lower and therefore being available for the same work at lower rates constitutes discrimination. Presumably Haji is being paid less because he lives in India (at least if I follow your line of reasoning) and has lower overhead, not because of his nationality, culture, or skin color.
There are lots of things linux is great for, and depending on your usage it might even be a decent desktop OS. But that's certainly not the case for every desktop user, even with releases from the "last X years" (though I agree they are getting better).
I've run and used daily both an OS X and an Ubuntu workstation for several years, and in that time I've essentially given up on trying to make A/V playback, browser plugins, or even multiple-screen use work on the linux box. 95% of the stuff works fine -- I can play back most codecs, use most browser plugins, and display video on both screens. But that last 5% takes hours to fix, if it can be fixed at all. There are still some codecs I just can't make work, some plugins that won't run, and my cursor is either displayed incorrectly or slightly mis-aligned on my second and third monitors, even after hours of tweaking.
I'm not saying my Mac never annoys me, but when it does the answer is almost always cut and dry -- "it can't be done". Compare that to the linux machine, where "it works for me", or "you just have to do to get it going, unless you have GPU X, then you need to do ". Now sometimes those extra 28 steps are worthwhile, because I can do things that aren't possible on my Mac. But sometimes those extra 28 steps just eat 30 minutes of my life, and if I was using my Mac I wouldn't have wasted the time.
If I were just doing basic computing tasks, and didn't care to muck with the configuration, a linux desktop would be perfectly acceptable and would require little maintenance. But as someone who wants to play with things, and who isn't willing to accept that it works for others but not for me, a linux desktop can be a huge distraction and time sink.
/ Would give my grandmother linux on the desktop
// Still has a linux desktop in daily use
/// Just also needs a unix-like computer that works well enough to keep me from getting distracted by administrative tasks
Plus you'll probably want an iPhone, which is not cheap.
But compare that to other perfectly successful mobile platforms like Windows Mobile, which requires that you buy a Lenovo-compatible PC, MS Windows, and MS Visual Studio. Even assuming you get a cheap CPU bundled with Windows it wouldn't be hard to get to $700. Plus the phone of course. And for Windows Mobile code signing is $300+ per app.
I'm not saying cheaper wouldn't be better, but people are already making good money selling apps that are way more expensive to develop.
Really? For a complete selling infrastructure including payment processing?
Kagi charges like 16%*, and that's just for payment processing -- you still have to do your own distribution and installation. I'm not saying 30% is cheap, but it's hardly unreasonable.
* Kagi has flat fees, percentage fees, and both flat and percentage credit-card fees, so the exact amount varies from order to order. Given a $10 credit-card order it comes out to about 16%.
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Can't you have your log system send you an email every day with all abnormal entries? It's a bit of work to define "normal" initially, but it's generally not complicated -- 95% of your logs are going to be entries about access from authorized users on authorized networks doing a small number of authorized things, and those are pretty easy to filter even with something as simple as awk (and trivial with more advanced tools).
Start with that remaining 5% and whittle it down bit-by-bit until the daily report is small enough to actually read every day. Because if you're not reading your logs on a regular, timely basis they're essentially useless for anything other than post-mortem analysis.
What good are your automation tools if they don't work as expected? Didn't you test them before deploying them?
Sure, it's probably good to manually compare the output of the monitoring tools to the verbose logs once in a while, but unless you've got really bad automation that should be nothing more than an infrequent formality on historical data -- the day-to-day monitoring should all by done by tools that don't get bored by the thousands of nominal log entires.
I don't know about you, but I'd consider many kinds of porn very educational, and a few even research-worthy. But then again I don't understand what all this "the boobies will damage my childrens" ranting is about anyway, or why it only applies between 3 and 18, but not between birth and 3 or 18 and death.
Beyond that I generally agree with your second point -- in-class use is probably a bad idea unless there's an actual active use for the systems. But there's no need for a technological solution to that problem; you could just have the students put their laptops under their desks whenever there isn't a reason to have them out. It seems to work just fine for books, cell phones, lipstick and all sorts of other potentially distracting items that are commonly brought into classrooms.
I'd be willing to pay more in property tax to live in a school district that simply avoided all federal funding and the stupid restrictions that go with it. I know no one likes taxes, but I'd rather have less money and more freedom than the other way around It's not even like the federal government provides huge amounts of money to schools -- the average is like 7% -- so I don't know why anyone puts up with this "free" money in the first place. It reminds me a little of taking a "free" loan from your father-in-law -- the financial terms might look good, but the overall price is far too high.
In general I agree -- we oppress students much more than is justified -- but it's silly to speak as though the rights granted (or reserved, depending on your point of view) by first amendment were absolute and without exception.
First, we've generally accepted that minors don't have the same rights as adults, constitutional or otherwise; many rights are extended to children through their parents -- their parents have the right to travel freely and can allow their children to do the same -- but children themselves cannot simply set off cross-country without the consent of their guardian(s). The constitution doesn't say anything in particular about this, but it's been accepted as law since well before the constitution was drafted.
Second, the first amendment only extends insofar as your actions do not impede the rights or immediate safety of others. There's that whole "yell fire...theater" bit you might recall. Or your right to play music at 110 dB, but only until 9 PM (or whenever you local noise ordinance kicks in).
I don't understand how buying a "linux laptop" -- whatever that is -- makes the processor, architecture or performance any better 6 year later; in my experience any 6-year-old laptop is pretty hard to use, no matter what OS shipped with it.
Now a laptop running linux might save you money on software upgrades,should you choose to buy them, but let's not even pretend that A) an educational institution with hundreds or thousands of licenses is paying retail prices OS updates (in my actual experience in that situation it's more like $20/machine-year even if you always want the latest and greatest) or B) that the same institution wouldn't be paying RedHat a huge sum annually to provide "support" every system they're running.
But it was OS 9 so that wasn't much. I really find it hard to believe /anyone/ used macs before OS X.
Not that I disagree -- when it was OS 9 vs. W2K Apple was looking pretty anemic in a lot of ways. But remember that people used Windows (and DOS) before NT; compared to that OS 9 seems like a blessing.
In my experience, no, they wouldn't.
Most linux users -- even talented ones -- rarely do anything to their system files other than apply vendor-created packages. For most people the idea of replacing system libraries with non-standard versions is almost unthinkable; if they wanted some other functionality they'd switch distros, not replace standard system files.
Fair use lets me make copies of any copyrighted work to which I have legitimate access, regardless of the license, at least in certain circumstances. Personal use on alternate media is one of those circumstances.
The only legal violation is removing DRM, which isn't a copyright issue but a problem with the DMCA, and one that many people have asked to be made an official exemption.
Maybe because I'm not at home while it happens -- I have a laptop without a BR drive.
Maybe because I don't want to switch disks. I own hundreds of DVDs, and it would be nice to browse them from the remote, rather than by hand.
But I probably shouldn't answer at all -- you're just looking for excuses to troll.
Yes. It can update NVRAM settings from various control panels.
I've never been able to figure out why I have to reboot and poke through some silly BIOS configuration screen to select a startup disk, change the power settings/timer, or enable/disable WoL on WinTel machines. I mean, I can set the clock from inside the OS, and that's BIOS-controlled data (at least between boots) -- why are other settings not accessible?
But it's still one less minute. If someone is going to spend 18 minutes/day browsing the Internet from work, what make you think a slow login would deduct from one of those minute and not one of the productive work minutes?
A £15 no-name player does not have comparable storage space to a £200, 120 GB iPod Classic. I'm sure there are some devices that do have as much storage, and they may well cost less than an iPod, but they aren't even close to £15.
And the iPod Touch is hardly in the same market as generic MP3 players. That's like saying that it's silly to buy a £350 Dell desktop instead of a £15 no-name PDA -- they devices aren't even comparable.
And if we were talking about data that needed to be transmitted low bitrates might be desirable. But given that 120 GB of music at 512 kbps is almost 23 days of continuous playback it seems pretty silly to quibble about it even on portable music players. No matter how good the codec, there's more information preserved at higher bitrates. And as you noted, at higher bitrates codecs have similar performance. So as long as you make reasonable bitrate choices the actual code shouldn't matter.
I'm not saying that OGG doesn't have advantages, I just don't know why you think anyone other than people committed to that patent-free political aspect would care; the technical arguments are pretty insignificant.
Hey -- you with the AC ID.
Really you should know better.
There IS such a thing as a T1 line. It's a specific type of carrier used to transmit digital data via biploar encoding. It can be used to provide services such as a 1.544 Mbps DS-1 point-to-point data connection.
Also, anyone who is licensed to lay communication lines can sell you the line (local loop) so you don't have to buy from the ILEC.
Also, remember, a "T1" or other DS-1 or similar link it is called is just a point-to-point connection. At the remote end of your link you'll need someone to terminate your service onto the Internet. IP routing abstracted over a serial layer abstracted over synchronous frames using all signaling channels is a typical solution, but there's really nothing to stop you from sending 24 simulated MODEM signals over the DS-0 PCM channels and letting the remote end decode back to analog and de-multiplex.
Fucking idiot.
The fact that you're afraid that *you* might be criminally liable because someone you don't even know did something illegal with an Internet connection you happen to pay for is a sad comment on how far we let this "for the children" fascism dictate our lives. I'm not saying it's impossible to be prosecuted for the crimes of strangers who happened to be nearby -- your fear is not totally unfounded -- but it's not something you *should* have to worry about.
No one is afraid that leaving their car unlocked might make them criminally liable if the car was stolen and used in a crime, even a crime against children -- at best you're creating an attractive nuisance (if the thief is a child), and even that would be a stretch. You're probably not even worried that willfully lending your car to someone might result in criminal liability, unless you could reasonably foresee that they were going to commit a crime using your vehicle. But for some reason leaving your access point unprotected, or actively advertising it as available to strangers is a potential crime because they might do something illegal that you don't even know about.
It's worth noting that a significant portion of most land-line phone bills is various fees and taxes that will go away when you give up the dialtone -- Qwest charges extra for their "naked" line as well, and when you first look at it the price difference is not significant. But tack on the Universal Access Fee, e911 fee, and all the other sundry fees and taxes on dialtone service and it's actually quite a bit cheaper to drop the phone service.
I don't know that AT&T would be cheaper without a dialtone, I'm just saying it's important to note the non-trivial "other charges" section of the bill when you're comparing the price.
I'd be surprised if any hub Linksys ever sold contained a copy of any GNU tool in such a fashion that it would require distribution of the source.
Routers, firewalls, sure. Maybe even switches. But if you've got a modified glibc on your hub you're doing it wrong. Hub prices fell because the requisite hardware got cheaper, not because they used free tools.
I know you're joking, but you could just as easily say that copyright law is stifling innovation by preventing small, independent inventors from using the work of large American corporations without contributing in kind -- the law works both ways.
You claim that disk fragmentation decreased stability, but you didn't actually cite an example of decreased stability. All you said was that the data was fragmented and that after defragmenting it was no longer fragmented.
I call BS on you're "they all want Office 2007". They might all want Office 2003 -- I have yet to meet a user who liked Office 2007 on their new computer, and OpenOffice is arguably a closer match to Office 2003 in terms of user interface.
I didn't know that:
A) "Indian" was a race (unless you meant the indigenous people of North America). As far as I know India is a country (or at best a sub-continent) and so discrimination toward Indians would be nationalism, not racism.
B) That only Indians can be named Haji. Aren't you being racist by assuming that names are tied to race?
C) That living someplace where the cost of living and common wages are lower and therefore being available for the same work at lower rates constitutes discrimination. Presumably Haji is being paid less because he lives in India (at least if I follow your line of reasoning) and has lower overhead, not because of his nationality, culture, or skin color.
There are lots of things linux is great for, and depending on your usage it might even be a decent desktop OS. But that's certainly not the case for every desktop user, even with releases from the "last X years" (though I agree they are getting better).
I've run and used daily both an OS X and an Ubuntu workstation for several years, and in that time I've essentially given up on trying to make A/V playback, browser plugins, or even multiple-screen use work on the linux box. 95% of the stuff works fine -- I can play back most codecs, use most browser plugins, and display video on both screens. But that last 5% takes hours to fix, if it can be fixed at all. There are still some codecs I just can't make work, some plugins that won't run, and my cursor is either displayed incorrectly or slightly mis-aligned on my second and third monitors, even after hours of tweaking.
I'm not saying my Mac never annoys me, but when it does the answer is almost always cut and dry -- "it can't be done". Compare that to the linux machine, where "it works for me", or "you just have to do to get it going, unless you have GPU X, then you need to do ". Now sometimes those extra 28 steps are worthwhile, because I can do things that aren't possible on my Mac. But sometimes those extra 28 steps just eat 30 minutes of my life, and if I was using my Mac I wouldn't have wasted the time.
If I were just doing basic computing tasks, and didn't care to muck with the configuration, a linux desktop would be perfectly acceptable and would require little maintenance. But as someone who wants to play with things, and who isn't willing to accept that it works for others but not for me, a linux desktop can be a huge distraction and time sink.
/ Would give my grandmother linux on the desktop
// Still has a linux desktop in daily use
/// Just also needs a unix-like computer that works well enough to keep me from getting distracted by administrative tasks
Plus you'll probably want an iPhone, which is not cheap.
But compare that to other perfectly successful mobile platforms like Windows Mobile, which requires that you buy a Lenovo-compatible PC, MS Windows, and MS Visual Studio. Even assuming you get a cheap CPU bundled with Windows it wouldn't be hard to get to $700. Plus the phone of course. And for Windows Mobile code signing is $300+ per app.
I'm not saying cheaper wouldn't be better, but people are already making good money selling apps that are way more expensive to develop.
Really? For a complete selling infrastructure including payment processing?
Kagi charges like 16%*, and that's just for payment processing -- you still have to do your own distribution and installation. I'm not saying 30% is cheap, but it's hardly unreasonable.
* Kagi has flat fees, percentage fees, and both flat and percentage credit-card fees, so the exact amount varies from order to order. Given a $10 credit-card order it comes out to about 16%.