OK, so exactly what do the RIAA say they own? I'm honestly a little confused. Here's an example. Take the following "binary" string off MetallicA's Fade to black CD:
1001101110100101101011010101010101010101...
Just a bunch of one's and zeros. Now the RIAA (and MetallicA) says they "own" that particular sequence of digits on a CD. OK, fine, now take and MP3 of the same song:
1110110101010101111110100101101010111111...
Now the RIAA says they "own" this sequence of digits and you cannot copy it and give it to someone. let's say I invert the digits:
0001001010101010000001011010010101000000...
Persumably the RIAA is going to says they "own" this sequence of digits too. Since I can conceivable write a program to turn any string of digits into an infinite number of different strings of digits and back, the RIAA is going to claim that they own all different strings that can conceivablly be somehow turned into that original string? With that logic the RIAA could claim the scanned image of my girlfriend is an illegal copy of MetallicA's Fade to Black. (given the right "decrypting" program)
What does this mean? Napster isn't illegal. The people using it may be doing illegal things, but even that is a bit suspect. At the basic level Person A is sending Person B a string of ones and zeros. Might be music, might be my girlfriend's picture, might be BOTH! Oddly enough this sounds like another similar arguement:
"Guns don't kill people, people do"
The root of the problem is the RIAA is trying to shoe-horn a 100 year old law into a new age of technology. The whole concept of copyright and IP is flawed. It just doesn't work anymore.
As a final example, I'll use my own industry as an example of what works. I write software. I am fully aware that if my software got into the handds of some unscrupulous person, it's sequence of bits could be changed, while preserving the basic function of the code to the point that any court would rule that the new seqments of code are different and thus not violating my copyright.
As an example:
for (int i=1;i10;i++) x += i;
is the same as:
x += 10*i
While my software is copyrighted, I do not rely on that to protect my code from others, what I do rely on is my secure server where my code runs, properly encrypted so that those unscrupulous people cannot access it.
Not to light a flame, but SDMI was "the right way" to go about the problem the RIAA has. Unfortunately, the current CD format cannot properly protect the artists data. One option would be to change the format. An econmically bad idea. I don't have the answer to the RIAA's problem (that of illegal use of their "property") but I know the problem is not Napster, it's Napster's users.
I would suggest you look into Solaris/x86 rather than FreeBSD. I've used both and find Soalris far more stable. Since you are under the 4-CPU limit, Solaris is free (last I checked). --
He had come like a thief in the night,
Hydroelectric power plants do something similar as well. Several plants in Washington, and I'm sure other places have their atomic power plant (which work much better under a constant load) run pumps at the hydroelectric dams in the off-peak hours. These pumps pump the water back up the dam. Thus allowing for more hydroelectric power in dry seasons. --
He had come like a thief in the night,
(NOTE: I haven't done all the research, but I'm sure these are close):
Number of people killed at Columbine: 12
Avg life span: 72 years or 26,280 days
Avg age of Columbine victim: 17 years or 6205 days
Days of life ruined from Columbine: 240,900
Amount sued for: $5,000,000,000
One day of a person's life is worth: $20,755
Number of people who lost their jobs due to lame dot-com business plans (aka "Market Conditions"): 185,000
Average time out of work: 55 days
Average severance: 7 days
Percentage of day ruined while out of work: 25%
Number of days ruined from dot-coms: 2,220,000
Seems to me that:
1) dot-coms did more damage than Columbine
2) Someone should start a class action suit against the guys that thought up, the VCs who funded and the CEOs who took the high salaries of dead dot-coms for about $50,000,000,000.
The sad thing is, my idea has more validity than the idea of suing gaming companies. To some extent and arguement could made that VCs/CEOs/etc are to blame for ruining many peoples lives.
While I like, use, and support Open Source ideas as a developer, I must put on my Corporate hat and spend a moment to speak for the corporation.
Having started a few corporations of my own, I have learned many things about the value of a corporation. In the end, as an employee of a corporation, your success is tied into the success of the company (Unless you are the type of employee that has no stake or interest in the company you work for, in which case you should quit, becuase you are not doing anybody any good). The success of your company is measured by it's value. So how is value determined?
The contracts - The most valuable thing in an organization is the contracts held by that organization. Whether it be a long-term agreement by a long-distance carrier to supply service at a greatly reduced rate, or it's a contract with an employee to not divulge or develop the company's business practices with competitors. Any contract with an "open source clause (OSC)" like the one metioned would immediately devalue any contract it was in.
The technology - For many "infrastructure" or software only companies, their value hinges on the technology the have designed or coded that their competition does not have. For example, Veritas, their company is based around technology (and the software to implement) backup systems, server clustering and the like. Obviously an OSC would give the technology away to anyone who wants it, thus devaluing the company.
Barriers to entry - Never thought I'd use something from ECON 101, but here it is. Akin to techonology is the barrier to entry. This creates value in a company by making it difficult for prospective competitors to enter the market. Sometimes this takes the form of patents, other times a truely complicated algorythm. Another popular form is a closed data file format. All these things make it more difficult for competitors to compete, making your company more valuable. OSC would alomst destroy barriers to entry. You can't get a patent on something that Open Source.
Notice that "money" is no where on that list. The value of a company depends very little on the money that a company has, but on what intangables it contains. Why? Beucase intangables can be converted to money at varing values. A dollar is always a dollar, but a contract for a dollar could be worth $0.65 or $20. So saving 10% or 30% off the cost of writing something is really not a good bargin when you are calculating the value of a company. In the end, I cannot fathom why any company whose goal is to make money would want to release it's work to the Open Source community. Does this mean a company should not use open source software? HELL NO! Open source software is very cost-effective, and (most is)well-supported. It's when the company moves from a user of Open Source to a developer of Open Source that the problems arise. --
He had come like a thief in the night,
I totally agree. The BBB is just another form of corporate bribery (or is it extortion?) Pay money, you get to use the BBB logo, pay enough money and no matter how many complaints you get, the BBB will do nothing. But that's ok I guess, since no one pays attention to the BBB logo anyway.
The solution? Group all the "*sucks" sites together into the top level domain ".sucks" Have a private organization run the servers (I'll volunteer servers and my admin abilities if someone has spare bandwidth and a co-lo:), then make sure the company doesn't get it's own name (for example Best Buy cannot own bestbuy.sucks) Sure the site will be one-sided against the company, but hey! a company's web site is one-sided FOR the company so it balances out.
BTW, epinions.com does allow people to comment about almost anything. Not sure if their business model is viable, and thus how long they'll be around. But I always check there before buying anything or dealing with a company to see what others have said. --
He had come like a thief in the night,
If you want to stay with self-run software I would check out either NetSaint or BigBrother, both are free. I stongly recommend NetSaint as it is easier to add custom service monitoring than BigBrother and I believe has a better interface. Big Brother however is simpler to setup and is all in Perl, so if you need to hack it up a bit, it's not too hard.
One thing no Corporation with a web site should be without is off-site monitoring. This is invaluable in determining whether people can visit your site. Two major players in this arena are RedAlert and ServiceMetrics. RedAlert runs a meer $20 per month per URL. And will test your site every 15 minutes to see if it is accessible, if it is not, it will email/page you. It also has the option of looking for a keyword in the response in order to make sure your CGI, Java, ASP is working.
ServiceMetrics is more expensive, but actually uses machines around the world to hit your site, and has more monitoring features such as variable SLAs, web-based traceroute, and HTML timing (in which they tell you give a web page, not only how long it takes to download the web page, but also how long it takes to do all the images associtated with that page, letting you know the total time for anywhere in the world.) I would strongly recommend RedAlert be added to your monitoring package. --
He had come like a thief in the night,
You can get 40GB IDE drives for $95, probably less if you buy them in bulk. Get removable drive trays and use IDE drives instead. Admittedly they are not as "long term" as Optical/CDs and vunerable to magnets, but if they are for off-site storage, this shouldn't be a problem. --
He had come like a thief in the night,
Back in the days of terminal servers, companies where afraid of hackers using their modems. To make sure only authorized connections are allowed, they used to have callback systems. A person would dial the modem, enter a username and password. The modem would hangup and dial the assigned number for the validated user and the connection would begin. The fact that the callback number could only be changed from inside the office made sure that only authorized connections could be made.
I would think a similar system would work in your case. Most firewalls are concerned with traffic going in, not traffic coming out. Create a server in the office with an HTTP server on it. Add a java servlet/perl/cgi module to the server to ask for a user name and password. If the correct username/password is given, an ssh tunnel is open from the inside server to the remote machine on file for that user. if you don't need that much security, or have dynamic IPs at home, then pass a username/password/IP combination and have it open the tunnel to the given IP.
Another option is to look into VPNs, which you could create on your firewall, once connected, you would be considered "inside" the office, and could do anything you want. Cisco VPNs, while a little tricky to install, are secure, and well supported on their firewalls and routers. Be sure to have your VPN data encrypted.
--
He had come like a thief in the night,
Gee, I'd be all for UD if they were looking for a cure for cancer, but they are not. They are looking for a treatment for cancer. In fact, no one looks for a cure. There's no money in a cure. The only money is in the treatment.
How do I know they are looking for a treatment and not a cure. Think hard, in the last 30 - 40 years, what has science cured? Polio, that's about it. Everything else is just a treatment.
Just my two cents. --
He had come like a thief in the night,
I'm not sure what you mean by "submit". If you are using SQL, all data is strings, so the strings are parsed into binary. I cannot believe that parsing hex is any faster than parsing decimal, There may be a spare clock cycle or so at most due to the base 16 being a nice power of two.
If you are CODING the database server and talking about data in the code, during compiling it's translated to binary. so it doesn't really matter there either. In the end, it's all 1s and 0s. The only place it could be considered faster to use Hex is if you are doing translations from int to string. In this case, going from binary to hex is faster than binary to decimal (due to the base 16 again) but remember, only by a clock cycle or two.
Hope that helped. --
He had come like a thief in the night,
The first web browser was NCSA Mosiac. it's early beta versions started with an "internal" web page, much like Netscape. So that's probably the oldest, however since it wasn't really "on the web" I would have to vote for either the NCSA home page or the NCSA Mosiac for X/Windows page.
P.S. I did actually work at the UIUC/NCSA during the development of Mosiac, but for the life of me I cannot remember what was the first page I saw, I just know it was a NCSA page.
--
He had come like a thief in the night,
After reading the posts on here you'd think the second coming of Christ was on hand. Everyoner says "It's not fair!" or "How could FCC, Courts, ATT, etc do this to us?" I have only two comments:
1. Company's have a duty to their shareholders and creditors, not their customers That's right, companies don't owe you squat. Look at the contract you signed. Do you see anywhere it says they have to provide service? No. The deal is you pay, they give you service, they don't give you service, you don't pay. Simple as that. This company was going out of business, they need to focus on getting the best deal for their shareholders and creditors. Customer sastisfaction is only important if your in business.
2. It's not the electric company Ok, if this was the California power companies, I could understand the concern. We have become dependant on certain utilities such as water, electricity, gas, heating oil. And in those cases I would say that those utilities and the governement have a responsibility to be sure that even if they go out of business, you still have power, water, etc. But this is the Internet, it's not a utility, you can live just fine without it. No one, no matter how geeky needs the Internet. Do you guy run out and protest the local Safeway when they close down a store near you? No.
"Well what about companies?" you say. Any company whose business relies on the Internet is not going to be Northpoint. If they are, they need a slap up-side the head. I bet they run Oracle on NT connected to NetApp too. --
He had come like a thief in the night,
Too much work, just use HDD
on
DVDs On DAT?
·
· Score: 1
After factoring the cost of the Tape Drive, the Media, the empty area on the end of a tape that is wasted, and the time or money for the software to perform the playback, looks to me like you should just buy a bunch of cheap hard drives and copy the files. If you are worried about data recovery, use RAID-5, even with the extra $100 I think it'll come out cheaper in the end. Plus, with hard drives, you'll have many different options to play back the video. Better yet, get an external setup and take your movies to your friends! Hey... maybe there's a new product there... --
He had come like a thief in the night,
CompactPCI is a relatively new spec, and as such there is not a lot of products in the CompactPCI line, nor is there any performance spec or testing done on this platform. cPCI is primarily used in the telephony industry where it afford extrememly high port density. You may be better off looking at the ISA bus, or the PCI passive-backplane. Both have been around much longer and have been shown to be stable. For a simple application such as a firewall, ISA or PCI will be fine. That said, here are some links to companies I have used in the past.
Advantech supplied a full line of CompactPCI chassis and system boards at very reasonable prices. They also carry PC104, and other custom SBCs.
Crystal PC supplies ISA-based computer systems in various rackmount configurations. Especially useful if you need 20 or 30 of the same box in a rack. They specialize in 1U and "toolbox" computers.
I would also like to take a minute and caution you against using *BSD (or Linux) as a firewall. While it is true that they came be designed for less, and that you have greater control, it also means you have greater responsibility to maintain these system. The advantage to a Cisco PIX is that the OS is not well know and not available for download. In the case of BSD, there are many more exploits available. Worse, you need to worry about both OS exploits and Firewall software exploits. In the case of the PIX, the OS is the firewall, and exploits are far fewer. While it may be more expensive, think of the cost to your business that a breach would cause. After you factor in the extra work, extra maintenance, and lower security, you'll find a PIX is much more cost effective.
--
He had come like a thief in the night,
And how much of this flight-time will be bought up by the government to spy on us Americans? I can see it now, I search for the words "Potassium Nitrate" in google and the next thing i know the plane is tracking me from afar.
Better yet, I used to have an 18-foot Sat. dish and receive news channel remote broadcasts before they hit the studio, you'd be amazed at what camera men shine their camera's on when they are not on the air (you guessed it, boobs). I can't wait to see what these guys are gonna do with their camera free-time.
My question is, who's watching the watchers? --
He had come like a thief in the night,
What are you looking to get? Unless your friends/family are all geeks, they will probably wnat to get you something practical, so the trick is to get cool practical stuff. I recommend either Crate & Barrel or Williams and Sonoma. Both has tons of good stuff, and you'll need a lot of kitchen stuff after the marriage. (Actually, I confess, W&S is on the list because I'm a cooking geek, if there is such a thing).
For those that want to get you something different, register at Home Depot for power tools (MORE POWER! I need MORE POWER!) and other hardware. Finally, although they don't have a registry, Firebox is a great site for geek stuff.
Congratulations on getting married! --
He had come like a thief in the night,
I love old keyboards, they don't make them like they used to. My personal favorite is the old IBM PS/2 Model M. You know, the ones that goes CLICK after every keypress. It's probably the exact opposite of what you need. However, I cannot use it at night becuase the GF says the CLICK keeps her up. SOOOoooo....
I recommend the old Gateway AnyKey keyboards, you can find them on eBay. They are light and quiet. They also have the advantage of being programable. You can change the keys around, or program macros into a particular key, very helpful for coding or shells. You have to be careful though, Gateway has gone through many styles of keyboards. Be sure to get one with the F-Keys across the top and down the side, the Model # is 2191101-XX-XXX.
Other options include this keyboard from American Global. I know it's made from rack mounts, but it has a good light feel. Oh, and how could I forget the SUN Type 6 keyboards, small, light, and with that cool SUN logo. The Type 6 keyboard is probably better than the Gateway as far as touch and feel, but it does have two significant drawbacks: 1) I'm not sure it works on PCs, although it SHOULD. Even if it does, it doesn't support macros/keymaps. 2) the backspace key is in the "wrong" place. Petty I know, but after years of going back and forth from SUN to PC hour by hour, backspace placement gets REAL annoying.
I should also mention this article which, along with this one have made claim that light-touch keyboards are contributing to wrist pain in the first place. --
He had come like a thief in the night,
Most of the companies building Xterms jumped on the Network Computer (NC) bandwagon. The only major player that survived the fiasco was NCD. They've made Xterms for quite a while. If you are interested I have about 30 of them sitting in my garage. You will need to buy the server software about $300 from NCD, but I'd be happy to sell you (or anyone else) some of them for $25 each (+s/h). (Note: These do not have screens, but have a standard VGA port). Also, you can check out places like CRA that sell (hell they give it away sometimes) used Xterms, WinTerms, NCs, and whatever else you need.
If you want windows, Citrix has teamed up with NCD to make WinTerms that work with Windows 2000 Term Server. --
He had come like a thief in the night,
1. There are plenty of telephony systems for Linux/Solaris that have APIs written in C. It would take only a day to interface these cards with Java via JNI. I've done it before. If you are doing VoIP only then I recommend Dialogic (now Intel) or Brooktrout. They are very inexpensive, especially if you need high port density (up to 96 ports per board). Brooktrout is offering great deals now, since they are new to the market and want to get some market share. If you are doing a combinations of things (Voice, IVR, FAX, VoIP) then try Natural MicroSystems. A bit more pricey, but they have a rock solid API that has everything you'd need. They also have an octel board that supports 196 ports.
2. Use a system built around JTAPI. This would be for VoIP only, since I know of no reasonably priced implementation of JTAPI on hardware that does anything else. (If you find one, let me know, I need IVR, VM and outbound dialing it for a project I'm doing). Here's a short list of JTAPI Implementations:
NOTE: I've priced the lucent system, the quote that came back was in the six figures!!!
JTAPI is relatively new, and the only people with implementations are those who helped design the spec. If my company decides to sell the implementation I'm in the process of writing as a package, I'll be sure to email you. --
He had come like a thief in the night,
Personally, I think the ACLU et al. is going at the from the worng angle. They should be sueing over the fact that the government is forcing (via a tax) everyone with a phone to pay for some kid to check out porno at a library. The case would be easier to prove (just have to show how to get around the filters and bring up a big page of hardcore), the public outrage would be greater, and the end would be the repeal of the tax (a much better plan than trying to restrict funding).
But wait! that means the ACLU, a liberal organization, would have to ralley against a tax. It's amazing how the same group can ralley against control of your eyes/speech, but FOR control of your wallet. --
He had come like a thief in the night,
Slashdot Mirror
OK, so exactly what do the RIAA say they own? I'm honestly a little confused. Here's an example. Take the following "binary" string off MetallicA's Fade to black CD:
1001101110100101101011010101010101010101...
Just a bunch of one's and zeros. Now the RIAA (and MetallicA) says they "own" that particular sequence of digits on a CD. OK, fine, now take and MP3 of the same song:
1110110101010101111110100101101010111111...
Now the RIAA says they "own" this sequence of digits and you cannot copy it and give it to someone. let's say I invert the digits:
0001001010101010000001011010010101000000...
Persumably the RIAA is going to says they "own" this sequence of digits too. Since I can conceivable write a program to turn any string of digits into an infinite number of different strings of digits and back, the RIAA is going to claim that they own all different strings that can conceivablly be somehow turned into that original string? With that logic the RIAA could claim the scanned image of my girlfriend is an illegal copy of MetallicA's Fade to Black. (given the right "decrypting" program)
What does this mean? Napster isn't illegal. The people using it may be doing illegal things, but even that is a bit suspect. At the basic level Person A is sending Person B a string of ones and zeros. Might be music, might be my girlfriend's picture, might be BOTH! Oddly enough this sounds like another similar arguement:
"Guns don't kill people, people do"
The root of the problem is the RIAA is trying to shoe-horn a 100 year old law into a new age of technology. The whole concept of copyright and IP is flawed. It just doesn't work anymore.
As a final example, I'll use my own industry as an example of what works. I write software. I am fully aware that if my software got into the handds of some unscrupulous person, it's sequence of bits could be changed, while preserving the basic function of the code to the point that any court would rule that the new seqments of code are different and thus not violating my copyright.
As an example:
for (int i=1;i10;i++) x += i;
is the same as:
x += 10*i
While my software is copyrighted, I do not rely on that to protect my code from others, what I do rely on is my secure server where my code runs, properly encrypted so that those unscrupulous people cannot access it.
Not to light a flame, but SDMI was "the right way" to go about the problem the RIAA has. Unfortunately, the current CD format cannot properly protect the artists data. One option would be to change the format. An econmically bad idea. I don't have the answer to the RIAA's problem (that of illegal use of their "property") but I know the problem is not Napster, it's Napster's users.
--
He had come like a thief in the night,
I would suggest you look into Solaris/x86 rather than FreeBSD. I've used both and find Soalris far more stable. Since you are under the 4-CPU limit, Solaris is free (last I checked).
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He had come like a thief in the night,
There already is a java decomipler. It is called jad, and can be found here.
--
He had come like a thief in the night,
Hydroelectric power plants do something similar as well. Several plants in Washington, and I'm sure other places have their atomic power plant (which work much better under a constant load) run pumps at the hydroelectric dams in the off-peak hours. These pumps pump the water back up the dam. Thus allowing for more hydroelectric power in dry seasons.
--
He had come like a thief in the night,
(NOTE: I haven't done all the research, but I'm sure these are close):
Number of people killed at Columbine: 12
Avg life span: 72 years or 26,280 days
Avg age of Columbine victim: 17 years or 6205 days
Days of life ruined from Columbine: 240,900
Amount sued for: $5,000,000,000
One day of a person's life is worth: $20,755
Number of people who lost their jobs due to lame dot-com business plans (aka "Market Conditions"): 185,000
Average time out of work: 55 days
Average severance: 7 days
Percentage of day ruined while out of work: 25%
Number of days ruined from dot-coms: 2,220,000
Seems to me that:
1) dot-coms did more damage than Columbine
2) Someone should start a class action suit against the guys that thought up, the VCs who funded and the CEOs who took the high salaries of dead dot-coms for about $50,000,000,000.
The sad thing is, my idea has more validity than the idea of suing gaming companies. To some extent and arguement could made that VCs/CEOs/etc are to blame for ruining many peoples lives.
--
He had come like a thief in the night,
I know that in the US, 6 companies control 98% of the food products sold. I believe in world the percentage drops to a whopping 95%.
Who controls the media doesn't bother me, who controls the food does.
--
He had come like a thief in the night,
B*M
B*TTY
KN*CKERS
KN*CKERS
and...
SEMPRINI
This post brought to you by Tony M. Nyphots Flying Riscue
--
He had come like a thief in the night,
While I like, use, and support Open Source ideas as a developer, I must put on my Corporate hat and spend a moment to speak for the corporation.
Having started a few corporations of my own, I have learned many things about the value of a corporation. In the end, as an employee of a corporation, your success is tied into the success of the company (Unless you are the type of employee that has no stake or interest in the company you work for, in which case you should quit, becuase you are not doing anybody any good). The success of your company is measured by it's value. So how is value determined?
The contracts - The most valuable thing in an organization is the contracts held by that organization. Whether it be a long-term agreement by a long-distance carrier to supply service at a greatly reduced rate, or it's a contract with an employee to not divulge or develop the company's business practices with competitors. Any contract with an "open source clause (OSC)" like the one metioned would immediately devalue any contract it was in.
The technology - For many "infrastructure" or software only companies, their value hinges on the technology the have designed or coded that their competition does not have. For example, Veritas, their company is based around technology (and the software to implement) backup systems, server clustering and the like. Obviously an OSC would give the technology away to anyone who wants it, thus devaluing the company.
Barriers to entry - Never thought I'd use something from ECON 101, but here it is. Akin to techonology is the barrier to entry. This creates value in a company by making it difficult for prospective competitors to enter the market. Sometimes this takes the form of patents, other times a truely complicated algorythm. Another popular form is a closed data file format. All these things make it more difficult for competitors to compete, making your company more valuable. OSC would alomst destroy barriers to entry. You can't get a patent on something that Open Source.
Notice that "money" is no where on that list. The value of a company depends very little on the money that a company has, but on what intangables it contains. Why? Beucase intangables can be converted to money at varing values. A dollar is always a dollar, but a contract for a dollar could be worth $0.65 or $20. So saving 10% or 30% off the cost of writing something is really not a good bargin when you are calculating the value of a company. In the end, I cannot fathom why any company whose goal is to make money would want to release it's work to the Open Source community. Does this mean a company should not use open source software? HELL NO! Open source software is very cost-effective, and (most is)well-supported. It's when the company moves from a user of Open Source to a developer of Open Source that the problems arise.
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He had come like a thief in the night,
I totally agree. The BBB is just another form of corporate bribery (or is it extortion?) Pay money, you get to use the BBB logo, pay enough money and no matter how many complaints you get, the BBB will do nothing. But that's ok I guess, since no one pays attention to the BBB logo anyway.
:), then make sure the company doesn't get it's own name (for example Best Buy cannot own bestbuy.sucks) Sure the site will be one-sided against the company, but hey! a company's web site is one-sided FOR the company so it balances out.
The solution? Group all the "*sucks" sites together into the top level domain ".sucks" Have a private organization run the servers (I'll volunteer servers and my admin abilities if someone has spare bandwidth and a co-lo
BTW, epinions.com does allow people to comment about almost anything. Not sure if their business model is viable, and thus how long they'll be around. But I always check there before buying anything or dealing with a company to see what others have said.
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He had come like a thief in the night,
If you want to stay with self-run software I would check out either NetSaint or BigBrother, both are free. I stongly recommend NetSaint as it is easier to add custom service monitoring than BigBrother and I believe has a better interface. Big Brother however is simpler to setup and is all in Perl, so if you need to hack it up a bit, it's not too hard.
One thing no Corporation with a web site should be without is off-site monitoring. This is invaluable in determining whether people can visit your site. Two major players in this arena are RedAlert and ServiceMetrics. RedAlert runs a meer $20 per month per URL. And will test your site every 15 minutes to see if it is accessible, if it is not, it will email/page you. It also has the option of looking for a keyword in the response in order to make sure your CGI, Java, ASP is working.
ServiceMetrics is more expensive, but actually uses machines around the world to hit your site, and has more monitoring features such as variable SLAs, web-based traceroute, and HTML timing (in which they tell you give a web page, not only how long it takes to download the web page, but also how long it takes to do all the images associtated with that page, letting you know the total time for anywhere in the world.) I would strongly recommend RedAlert be added to your monitoring package.
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He had come like a thief in the night,
You can get 40GB IDE drives for $95, probably less if you buy them in bulk. Get removable drive trays and use IDE drives instead. Admittedly they are not as "long term" as Optical/CDs and vunerable to magnets, but if they are for off-site storage, this shouldn't be a problem.
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He had come like a thief in the night,
Back in the days of terminal servers, companies where afraid of hackers using their modems. To make sure only authorized connections are allowed, they used to have callback systems. A person would dial the modem, enter a username and password. The modem would hangup and dial the assigned number for the validated user and the connection would begin. The fact that the callback number could only be changed from inside the office made sure that only authorized connections could be made.
I would think a similar system would work in your case. Most firewalls are concerned with traffic going in, not traffic coming out. Create a server in the office with an HTTP server on it. Add a java servlet/perl/cgi module to the server to ask for a user name and password. If the correct username/password is given, an ssh tunnel is open from the inside server to the remote machine on file for that user. if you don't need that much security, or have dynamic IPs at home, then pass a username/password/IP combination and have it open the tunnel to the given IP.
Another option is to look into VPNs, which you could create on your firewall, once connected, you would be considered "inside" the office, and could do anything you want. Cisco VPNs, while a little tricky to install, are secure, and well supported on their firewalls and routers. Be sure to have your VPN data encrypted.
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He had come like a thief in the night,
Gee, I'd be all for UD if they were looking for a cure for cancer, but they are not. They are looking for a treatment for cancer. In fact, no one looks for a cure. There's no money in a cure. The only money is in the treatment.
How do I know they are looking for a treatment and not a cure. Think hard, in the last 30 - 40 years, what has science cured? Polio, that's about it. Everything else is just a treatment.
Just my two cents.
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He had come like a thief in the night,
I'm not sure what you mean by "submit". If you are using SQL, all data is strings, so the strings are parsed into binary. I cannot believe that parsing hex is any faster than parsing decimal, There may be a spare clock cycle or so at most due to the base 16 being a nice power of two.
If you are CODING the database server and talking about data in the code, during compiling it's translated to binary. so it doesn't really matter there either. In the end, it's all 1s and 0s. The only place it could be considered faster to use Hex is if you are doing translations from int to string. In this case, going from binary to hex is faster than binary to decimal (due to the base 16 again) but remember, only by a clock cycle or two.
Hope that helped.
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He had come like a thief in the night,
The first web browser was NCSA Mosiac. it's early beta versions started with an "internal" web page, much like Netscape. So that's probably the oldest, however since it wasn't really "on the web" I would have to vote for either the NCSA home page or the NCSA Mosiac for X/Windows page.
P.S. I did actually work at the UIUC/NCSA during the development of Mosiac, but for the life of me I cannot remember what was the first page I saw, I just know it was a NCSA page.
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He had come like a thief in the night,
After reading the posts on here you'd think the second coming of Christ was on hand. Everyoner says "It's not fair!" or "How could FCC, Courts, ATT, etc do this to us?" I have only two comments:
1. Company's have a duty to their shareholders and creditors, not their customers That's right, companies don't owe you squat. Look at the contract you signed. Do you see anywhere it says they have to provide service? No. The deal is you pay, they give you service, they don't give you service, you don't pay. Simple as that. This company was going out of business, they need to focus on getting the best deal for their shareholders and creditors. Customer sastisfaction is only important if your in business.
2. It's not the electric company Ok, if this was the California power companies, I could understand the concern. We have become dependant on certain utilities such as water, electricity, gas, heating oil. And in those cases I would say that those utilities and the governement have a responsibility to be sure that even if they go out of business, you still have power, water, etc. But this is the Internet, it's not a utility, you can live just fine without it. No one, no matter how geeky needs the Internet. Do you guy run out and protest the local Safeway when they close down a store near you? No.
"Well what about companies?" you say. Any company whose business relies on the Internet is not going to be Northpoint. If they are, they need a slap up-side the head. I bet they run Oracle on NT connected to NetApp too.
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He had come like a thief in the night,
Pricewatch shows regular IDE drives 40GB @ $100 = $10/movie (assuming 4GB movies)
After factoring the cost of the Tape Drive, the Media, the empty area on the end of a tape that is wasted, and the time or money for the software to perform the playback, looks to me like you should just buy a bunch of cheap hard drives and copy the files. If you are worried about data recovery, use RAID-5, even with the extra $100 I think it'll come out cheaper in the end. Plus, with hard drives, you'll have many different options to play back the video. Better yet, get an external setup and take your movies to your friends! Hey... maybe there's a new product there...
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He had come like a thief in the night,
Advantech supplied a full line of CompactPCI chassis and system boards at very reasonable prices. They also carry PC104, and other custom SBCs.
Crystal PC supplies ISA-based computer systems in various rackmount configurations. Especially useful if you need 20 or 30 of the same box in a rack. They specialize in 1U and "toolbox" computers.
Diversified Technologies supplies PCI SBCs, cPCI SBC, and an array of chassis.
I would also like to take a minute and caution you against using *BSD (or Linux) as a firewall. While it is true that they came be designed for less, and that you have greater control, it also means you have greater responsibility to maintain these system. The advantage to a Cisco PIX is that the OS is not well know and not available for download. In the case of BSD, there are many more exploits available. Worse, you need to worry about both OS exploits and Firewall software exploits. In the case of the PIX, the OS is the firewall, and exploits are far fewer. While it may be more expensive, think of the cost to your business that a breach would cause. After you factor in the extra work, extra maintenance, and lower security, you'll find a PIX is much more cost effective.
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He had come like a thief in the night,
And how much of this flight-time will be bought up by the government to spy on us Americans? I can see it now, I search for the words "Potassium Nitrate" in google and the next thing i know the plane is tracking me from afar.
Better yet, I used to have an 18-foot Sat. dish and receive news channel remote broadcasts before they hit the studio, you'd be amazed at what camera men shine their camera's on when they are not on the air (you guessed it, boobs). I can't wait to see what these guys are gonna do with their camera free-time.
My question is, who's watching the watchers?
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He had come like a thief in the night,
What are you looking to get? Unless your friends/family are all geeks, they will probably wnat to get you something practical, so the trick is to get cool practical stuff. I recommend either Crate & Barrel or Williams and Sonoma. Both has tons of good stuff, and you'll need a lot of kitchen stuff after the marriage. (Actually, I confess, W&S is on the list because I'm a cooking geek, if there is such a thing).
For those that want to get you something different, register at Home Depot for power tools (MORE POWER! I need MORE POWER!) and other hardware. Finally, although they don't have a registry, Firebox is a great site for geek stuff.
Congratulations on getting married!
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He had come like a thief in the night,
Adobe Dimensions (wireframe and other 3D to postscript)
An SGI Article on how to render OpenGL to postscript (with examples and source)
GLP (another OpenGL to PostScript app w/ source)
Adobe Dimensions is probably your best bet. Hope one of them works for you.
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He had come like a thief in the night,
I love old keyboards, they don't make them like they used to. My personal favorite is the old IBM PS/2 Model M. You know, the ones that goes CLICK after every keypress. It's probably the exact opposite of what you need. However, I cannot use it at night becuase the GF says the CLICK keeps her up. SOOOoooo....
I recommend the old Gateway AnyKey keyboards, you can find them on eBay. They are light and quiet. They also have the advantage of being programable. You can change the keys around, or program macros into a particular key, very helpful for coding or shells. You have to be careful though, Gateway has gone through many styles of keyboards. Be sure to get one with the F-Keys across the top and down the side, the Model # is 2191101-XX-XXX.
Other options include this keyboard from American Global. I know it's made from rack mounts, but it has a good light feel. Oh, and how could I forget the SUN Type 6 keyboards, small, light, and with that cool SUN logo. The Type 6 keyboard is probably better than the Gateway as far as touch and feel, but it does have two significant drawbacks: 1) I'm not sure it works on PCs, although it SHOULD. Even if it does, it doesn't support macros/keymaps. 2) the backspace key is in the "wrong" place. Petty I know, but after years of going back and forth from SUN to PC hour by hour, backspace placement gets REAL annoying.
I should also mention this article which, along with this one have made claim that light-touch keyboards are contributing to wrist pain in the first place.
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He had come like a thief in the night,
Most of the companies building Xterms jumped on the Network Computer (NC) bandwagon. The only major player that survived the fiasco was NCD. They've made Xterms for quite a while. If you are interested I have about 30 of them sitting in my garage. You will need to buy the server software about $300 from NCD, but I'd be happy to sell you (or anyone else) some of them for $25 each (+s/h). (Note: These do not have screens, but have a standard VGA port). Also, you can check out places like CRA that sell (hell they give it away sometimes) used Xterms, WinTerms, NCs, and whatever else you need.
If you want windows, Citrix has teamed up with NCD to make WinTerms that work with Windows 2000 Term Server.
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He had come like a thief in the night,
1. There are plenty of telephony systems for Linux/Solaris that have APIs written in C. It would take only a day to interface these cards with Java via JNI. I've done it before. If you are doing VoIP only then I recommend Dialogic (now Intel) or Brooktrout. They are very inexpensive, especially if you need high port density (up to 96 ports per board). Brooktrout is offering great deals now, since they are new to the market and want to get some market share. If you are doing a combinations of things (Voice, IVR, FAX, VoIP) then try Natural MicroSystems. A bit more pricey, but they have a rock solid API that has everything you'd need. They also have an octel board that supports 196 ports.
2. Use a system built around JTAPI. This would be for VoIP only, since I know of no reasonably priced implementation of JTAPI on hardware that does anything else. (If you find one, let me know, I need IVR, VM and outbound dialing it for a project I'm doing). Here's a short list of JTAPI Implementations:
Netergy
IBM's AlphaWorks
Lucent's PassageWay
NOTE: I've priced the lucent system, the quote that came back was in the six figures!!!
JTAPI is relatively new, and the only people with implementations are those who helped design the spec. If my company decides to sell the implementation I'm in the process of writing as a package, I'll be sure to email you.
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He had come like a thief in the night,
Personally, I think the ACLU et al. is going at the from the worng angle. They should be sueing over the fact that the government is forcing (via a tax) everyone with a phone to pay for some kid to check out porno at a library. The case would be easier to prove (just have to show how to get around the filters and bring up a big page of hardcore), the public outrage would be greater, and the end would be the repeal of the tax (a much better plan than trying to restrict funding).
But wait! that means the ACLU, a liberal organization, would have to ralley against a tax. It's amazing how the same group can ralley against control of your eyes/speech, but FOR control of your wallet.
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He had come like a thief in the night,