I'm not surprised to see something like this happen. It seemed there was all kinds of venture capital dollars in the 90's, some of it was bound to be put to something durable, like a network like this one.
A few people just had to take a bath on it. It wasn't a bad idea, it just couldn't work the first time around. At under $50 though, it should do really well.
I wonder if they're going to support the old modems?
I wouldn't have any idea, because I've used XP for about 3 total minutes, but I'd imagine that a bootdisk requires 4 floppies like in 2000. I suppose you could burn a CD.
I've brainstormed so many things that could be done at my office with a nicely put together linux boot disk, or better yet, a bootable CD complete with perl, ntfs module in the kernel (after it's not dangerous), and other snazzy stuff. Windows just sucks to maintain.
Kids, on the other hand... they'll treat those computers like gold. That is, if you let them.
True, but what will also happen is kids will be able to use them twice as well as many of their teachers, despite the teacher training. If ignorance leads to fear, as it often does, bright kids will probably be restricted or punished for doing cool stuff that teacher doesn't understand. A smart kid who manages ssh a file server and tries to su as root will probably be punished severely. It reminds me of that kid a few months ago who was caught hacking his school's system and ended up committing suicide to spare his family the shame of expulsion.
Stuff like this is bound to happen (well, maybe not suicide) because these computers are going to be exulted as some precious commodity that must be used within known parameters. They'll be obsolete in a few years and all that will ever have been done is some fancy document formatting in word and maybe some browsing to cnn.com. What a breakthough. sheesh.
Sure, if the sharing isn't happening behind a firewall. But as far as I know most residential router thingy's create a private lan that sits behind a firewall. Obviously they're not concerned about ip's completely, but bandwidth, but what's the difference between me having my 3 linux boxen and one Mac OS X box having access and some luser's Windows box with AOL and nimda hitting every web server on this side of the planet? If cable companies want to conserve their bandwidth, they should stop supporting virus laden operating systems (long shot). Now that I think about it, all they really want is more money, and they're following the flawed thinking that every pirate (not that I like that term) would be a subscriber if they couldn't get the service for free. It just isn't true.
Why can't we have non-profit member owned isps, like public radio? Then wireless networking would be encouraged, and we could probably get access for less. We could even have municipal access points to which anyone could connect.
I guess that's the pendulum swinging the other way.
"the source code, or programming instructions"
"for server computers, which dish out data to other devices"
"I was unable to successfully install the pre-release version of Star Office 6.0"
1. Written for idiots.
2. Written for idiots.
3. Written by idiot.
It totally sucks what happened to this guy, and I hope he's compensated in some way. Hopefully the/. effect will reach the UPS PR people and they'll realize that it would cost them less to make things right with him than lose the faith and business of many in the/. community.
But on another note, I would never imagine shipping something to myself in a move. Maybe it's because I've never moved interstate, much less international, but I just am too attached to my stuff to think of it being handled by complete strangers. Packing the box is one thing, but packing the vehicle is another entirely. UPS trucks bounce around quite a lot and I don't think things are very well secured in there. They should be more careful, but I'm not willing to risk my computers on good faith.
And yet another note... My parents recently moved and what my dad did was buy a 6x12' enclosed trailer for $2000. When we're done with it (it's proven very useful) he'll sell it for $1800 no sweat. We're lucky that we have a Jeep that can tow it, and a place we can keep it when we're not using it. But with those two conditions satisfied we've managed to save a lot of money while ensuring that our stuff is handled carefully.
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, is painted, but I'm not sure that the service is completely available. They're changing their security from wep encryption to blocking all but registered MAC addresses. I was really surprised when I fount out that the whole campus was painted. I guess when they started an initiative two years ago to put an internet kiosk around every corner they also thought to put a Cisco access point in each one.
Why oh why can we geeks never understand that the Justice Department is not the "Judicial Branch" that we all learned was a part of the system of checks and balances. This doesn't mean anything is going to happen. The Justice Department, which is part of the Executive branch, is lead by John Ashcroft. John Ashcroft is essentially a fascist. He will stop at nothing to snoop and pry into everyone's private affairs, using tax dollars to do it the whole time. He's basically our generation's version of J. Edgar Hoover, except he hasn't been successful yet.
I'm not worried. Congress would probably never think of allowing this, and the Supreme Court would basically be asking for a revolution if they allowed such a thing.
What I've heard is that Ximian has some of the strictest guidelines for code style and quality, which is more than I can say about what I've heard of M$. Also, I don't understand your (I didn't say stability:)) remark. Are you saying Outlook is stable and Evolution is not? I wouldn't say that, as someone who has to use Outlook at work. Half the time it doesn't exit cleanly, but who knows, that could be the crappy OS too.
Ximian's work has influenced my distribution choices in the recent past, because it is so good. Does anyone know if the Ximian Destop works with 'woody'? The Ximian site says potato, but I would imagine it would work with woody. I haven't taken the time to try yet.
I'll second that. Where I work we're starting to bring up some Linux boxen on old hardware to provide services just to our techical support people, like intranet and ftp. I'm looking into ways of doing sector level disk image copies (as an alternative to ghost) with linux on floppy setup and the ftp server (or nfs, if necessary) holding the w2k images. I'm not sure that it will work, but we can explore it on our own, and come to management later and say "we've got it going now, this is how we do it." The article says that managers don't want to hear about the operating system. This is true. But it isn't a problem because we can use it without hitting up Finance.
On another note... I think the first real win for Linux will be government and education. My school has labs full of Redhat machines in the IT college. That doesn't register on the balance sheet though. Also a lot of my users at work are simply telneting from a w2k box to a remote UNIX machine. There is no reason why we need to be running w2k for that, except, oh, wait, Exchange. Did I mention we're tied up in Exchange? Maybe there isn't as much hope.
I would have had the same problems had I not had the kickass help in #debian at irc.openprojects.org(net?). Debian is very straighforward, it's just the tools that set it apart take learning. Believe me though, as someone who has used Redhat, Debian is far superior, and can beat up any other distrobution out there. In fact, I'm just waiting for an excuse to replace Slackware on my desktop. If only that distro weren't so damn stable and easy to maintain. God damn quality, now I have to do real work! Wait, no, I have/., nevermind.:)
I just started using Slack after a long series of distro changes while I tried to find something I liked. I started with Redhat - as I think many do, but after becoming familiar with Linux I wanted something that would mesh better with many of the howtos out there. It seems to me Slack is about the cleanest distro out there. I guess if it looks to be shuffling off this mortal coil I'll have to go back to Debian. Apt-get sure is a nice thing to have and it seems Debian is thriving as much as ever.
I'm running a firewall too, and the guy who did the install was fully aware of it. On the invoice he just put "checked signal at the modem, contractor will do computer side." That was it. I have a Mac, two Linux boxes, one BSD box, and one Windows laptop (my dad's) behind the firewall and everything works great.
Does it play *real* mp3s, or crippled mp3s? It's my opinion that the players that force proprietary encryption on mp3 files in order to work shouldn't get to advertise as "mp3 players," because, in reality, they aren't.
But then, what am I going to do about it besides rant on/.?
I never knew that! That's ridiculous! I thought the real potential for free software was for the end user - not having to pay for software. I never knew that it cost so much money just to develop software for MS platforms. I would think that as the free tools for developing software for the *nixes get better that will become a real strength.
Good point, AC probably has nothing to fear. But...
That does not excuse poorly written law. There is a fine line here between what is right and what is wrong and every effort should be made to hold to this line in the law.
When I watch a DVD on my computer, using Xine and Captain CSS's d4d plugin I am violating the DMCA. I am breaking the law. Am I doing something wrong? I don't thing so. I'm watching a DVD that I paid for, using a DVD drive that I paid for. With my DVD drive came software for watching DVDs, so if there's any royalty to the MPAA or whoever they got the money, I effectively purchased a license to watch DVDs on my PC.
What Alan Cox is doing, if I understand the situation correctly, is deliberatly and provocatively breaking a law that he opposes, that he believes is unjust. It's the sort of behavior that Thoreau called Civil Disobedience.
I admire him for it, I think it's a brave thing to do. I expect our legislators to do a better job than they have done with the DMCA, and I support any effort that leads to that end.
Switch if you want to - but your reasoning doesn't make any sense. RH 7.1 came out in April. That's 6 months ago.
But I wouldn't abandon 7.1 just yet. Let folks mess with 7.2 and find out what they have to say. Besides, RH isn't worth anything until it's supported by Ximian, therefore, 7.1 is the way to go!
Re:The Glory of Emacs
on
GNU Emacs 21
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I can't take credit for the comment I'm about to sum up, so I'll put it in italics:
Emacs is a great OS, but it lacks a good text editor. That's why I use vi.
Whoever posted that originally tickled my funny bone...
I could go into a long winded explanation of how KVM switches work, but, to be honest, I found this to be boring, and I am sure that most of you would, too, so I will spare you the explanation.
More like you'll spare yourself the trouble of writing it. I'd like to know how they work. Oh well, now that my curiosity has been aroused I'll be able to kill another hour before football finding out how they work.
Slashdot Mirror
That settles it. From now on I am an athiest. I will not _admit_ to professing ignorance.
I'm not surprised to see something like this happen. It seemed there was all kinds of venture capital dollars in the 90's, some of it was bound to be put to something durable, like a network like this one.
A few people just had to take a bath on it. It wasn't a bad idea, it just couldn't work the first time around. At under $50 though, it should do really well.
I wonder if they're going to support the old modems?
I wouldn't have any idea, because I've used XP for about 3 total minutes, but I'd imagine that a bootdisk requires 4 floppies like in 2000. I suppose you could burn a CD.
I've brainstormed so many things that could be done at my office with a nicely put together linux boot disk, or better yet, a bootable CD complete with perl, ntfs module in the kernel (after it's not dangerous), and other snazzy stuff. Windows just sucks to maintain.
Kids, on the other hand ... they'll treat those computers like gold. That is, if you let them.
True, but what will also happen is kids will be able to use them twice as well as many of their teachers, despite the teacher training. If ignorance leads to fear, as it often does, bright kids will probably be restricted or punished for doing cool stuff that teacher doesn't understand. A smart kid who manages ssh a file server and tries to su as root will probably be punished severely. It reminds me of that kid a few months ago who was caught hacking his school's system and ended up committing suicide to spare his family the shame of expulsion.
Stuff like this is bound to happen (well, maybe not suicide) because these computers are going to be exulted as some precious commodity that must be used within known parameters. They'll be obsolete in a few years and all that will ever have been done is some fancy document formatting in word and maybe some browsing to cnn.com. What a breakthough. sheesh.
Any kind of user-moderated web service is inherantly flawed and can in no way be successful.
"Red Hat didn't do anyone any favors with this."
apt-get remove wu-ftpd
apt-get install pro-ftpd
Thank you Redhat. Or should I say thank you Debian?
Sure, if the sharing isn't happening behind a firewall. But as far as I know most residential router thingy's create a private lan that sits behind a firewall. Obviously they're not concerned about ip's completely, but bandwidth, but what's the difference between me having my 3 linux boxen and one Mac OS X box having access and some luser's Windows box with AOL and nimda hitting every web server on this side of the planet? If cable companies want to conserve their bandwidth, they should stop supporting virus laden operating systems (long shot). Now that I think about it, all they really want is more money, and they're following the flawed thinking that every pirate (not that I like that term) would be a subscriber if they couldn't get the service for free. It just isn't true.
Why can't we have non-profit member owned isps, like public radio? Then wireless networking would be encouraged, and we could probably get access for less. We could even have municipal access points to which anyone could connect.
I guess that's the pendulum swinging the other way.
"the source code, or programming instructions"
"for server computers, which dish out data to other devices"
"I was unable to successfully install the pre-release version of Star Office 6.0"
1. Written for idiots.
2. Written for idiots.
3. Written by idiot.
It totally sucks what happened to this guy, and I hope he's compensated in some way. Hopefully the /. effect will reach the UPS PR people and they'll realize that it would cost them less to make things right with him than lose the faith and business of many in the /. community.
But on another note, I would never imagine shipping something to myself in a move. Maybe it's because I've never moved interstate, much less international, but I just am too attached to my stuff to think of it being handled by complete strangers. Packing the box is one thing, but packing the vehicle is another entirely. UPS trucks bounce around quite a lot and I don't think things are very well secured in there. They should be more careful, but I'm not willing to risk my computers on good faith.
And yet another note... My parents recently moved and what my dad did was buy a 6x12' enclosed trailer for $2000. When we're done with it (it's proven very useful) he'll sell it for $1800 no sweat. We're lucky that we have a Jeep that can tow it, and a place we can keep it when we're not using it. But with those two conditions satisfied we've managed to save a lot of money while ensuring that our stuff is handled carefully.
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, is painted, but I'm not sure that the service is completely available. They're changing their security from wep encryption to blocking all but registered MAC addresses. I was really surprised when I fount out that the whole campus was painted. I guess when they started an initiative two years ago to put an internet kiosk around every corner they also thought to put a Cisco access point in each one.
People at universities are smart.
Why oh why can we geeks never understand that the Justice Department is not the "Judicial Branch" that we all learned was a part of the system of checks and balances. This doesn't mean anything is going to happen. The Justice Department, which is part of the Executive branch, is lead by John Ashcroft. John Ashcroft is essentially a fascist. He will stop at nothing to snoop and pry into everyone's private affairs, using tax dollars to do it the whole time. He's basically our generation's version of J. Edgar Hoover, except he hasn't been successful yet.
I'm not worried. Congress would probably never think of allowing this, and the Supreme Court would basically be asking for a revolution if they allowed such a thing.
What I've heard is that Ximian has some of the strictest guidelines for code style and quality, which is more than I can say about what I've heard of M$. Also, I don't understand your (I didn't say stability :)) remark. Are you saying Outlook is stable and Evolution is not? I wouldn't say that, as someone who has to use Outlook at work. Half the time it doesn't exit cleanly, but who knows, that could be the crappy OS too.
Ximian's work has influenced my distribution choices in the recent past, because it is so good. Does anyone know if the Ximian Destop works with 'woody'? The Ximian site says potato, but I would imagine it would work with woody. I haven't taken the time to try yet.
I'll second that. Where I work we're starting to bring up some Linux boxen on old hardware to provide services just to our techical support people, like intranet and ftp. I'm looking into ways of doing sector level disk image copies (as an alternative to ghost) with linux on floppy setup and the ftp server (or nfs, if necessary) holding the w2k images. I'm not sure that it will work, but we can explore it on our own, and come to management later and say "we've got it going now, this is how we do it." The article says that managers don't want to hear about the operating system. This is true. But it isn't a problem because we can use it without hitting up Finance.
On another note... I think the first real win for Linux will be government and education. My school has labs full of Redhat machines in the IT college. That doesn't register on the balance sheet though. Also a lot of my users at work are simply telneting from a w2k box to a remote UNIX machine. There is no reason why we need to be running w2k for that, except, oh, wait, Exchange. Did I mention we're tied up in Exchange? Maybe there isn't as much hope.
I would have had the same problems had I not had the kickass help in #debian at irc.openprojects.org(net?). Debian is very straighforward, it's just the tools that set it apart take learning. Believe me though, as someone who has used Redhat, Debian is far superior, and can beat up any other distrobution out there. In fact, I'm just waiting for an excuse to replace Slackware on my desktop. If only that distro weren't so damn stable and easy to maintain. God damn quality, now I have to do real work! Wait, no, I have /., nevermind. :)
I just started using Slack after a long series of distro changes while I tried to find something I liked. I started with Redhat - as I think many do, but after becoming familiar with Linux I wanted something that would mesh better with many of the howtos out there. It seems to me Slack is about the cleanest distro out there. I guess if it looks to be shuffling off this mortal coil I'll have to go back to Debian. Apt-get sure is a nice thing to have and it seems Debian is thriving as much as ever.
I'm running a firewall too, and the guy who did the install was fully aware of it. On the invoice he just put "checked signal at the modem, contractor will do computer side." That was it. I have a Mac, two Linux boxes, one BSD box, and one Windows laptop (my dad's) behind the firewall and everything works great.
It's all TCP/IP - aren't open standard great?
Ha, that's funny. Wish I could mod you up. But wait, isn't XP just a collection of bug fixes on 95 and added NTFS support?
Does it play *real* mp3s, or crippled mp3s? It's my opinion that the players that force proprietary encryption on mp3 files in order to work shouldn't get to advertise as "mp3 players," because, in reality, they aren't.
But then, what am I going to do about it besides rant on /.?
I never knew that! That's ridiculous! I thought the real potential for free software was for the end user - not having to pay for software. I never knew that it cost so much money just to develop software for MS platforms. I would think that as the free tools for developing software for the *nixes get better that will become a real strength.
I could send this story to the guy who's in charge of security where I work. But he's my boss, and he already thinks I'm Mr. Knowitall...
Damn... If only he read /., what a crime...
Good point, AC probably has nothing to fear. But...
That does not excuse poorly written law. There is a fine line here between what is right and what is wrong and every effort should be made to hold to this line in the law.
When I watch a DVD on my computer, using Xine and Captain CSS's d4d plugin I am violating the DMCA. I am breaking the law. Am I doing something wrong? I don't thing so. I'm watching a DVD that I paid for, using a DVD drive that I paid for. With my DVD drive came software for watching DVDs, so if there's any royalty to the MPAA or whoever they got the money, I effectively purchased a license to watch DVDs on my PC.
What Alan Cox is doing, if I understand the situation correctly, is deliberatly and provocatively breaking a law that he opposes, that he believes is unjust. It's the sort of behavior that Thoreau called Civil Disobedience.
I admire him for it, I think it's a brave thing to do. I expect our legislators to do a better job than they have done with the DMCA, and I support any effort that leads to that end.
Switch if you want to - but your reasoning doesn't make any sense. RH 7.1 came out in April. That's 6 months ago.
But I wouldn't abandon 7.1 just yet. Let folks mess with 7.2 and find out what they have to say. Besides, RH isn't worth anything until it's supported by Ximian, therefore, 7.1 is the way to go!
I can't take credit for the comment I'm about to sum up, so I'll put it in italics:
Emacs is a great OS, but it lacks a good text editor. That's why I use vi.
Whoever posted that originally tickled my funny bone...
I could go into a long winded explanation of how KVM switches work, but, to be honest, I found this to be boring, and I am sure that most of you would, too, so I will spare you the explanation.
More like you'll spare yourself the trouble of writing it. I'd like to know how they work. Oh well, now that my curiosity has been aroused I'll be able to kill another hour before football finding out how they work.
Looks like two people have gotten their jollies from modding down BP!