Healthcare or no, it's looking like the US's economy is moving to be solely based on intellectual property - patents, copyrights, licensing. Actual manufacturing and construction of anything will mostly occur abroad.
So, uh, how do we expect to maintain such a in the global economy? Seems like law enforcement and force are the only way. Not really sure what kind of national policy supports that. But Scary that.
VNC would be my first choice. Beware that even TightVNC and UltraVNC tend to automatically default to optimal settings for a LAN and not a WAN, so be sure to make all the clients check jpeg compression settings and test in advance. You'd want them to set their desktop resolution to match yours (the scaling sucks). With everything tuned, you'd get pretty good refresh rates, even with some modestly sized movies or animations. Mind that you'll have to find a separate channel to deliver audio.
Next you might want to consider H323 conferencing... gnomemeeting, netmeeting, and the like. In addition to voice and webcams, they should give you desktop sharing, text chat, and a whiteboard and crap. (Under Windows XP, netmeeting is hidden but still available via "Run | conf.exe")
If you have a high-end corporate conference room setup (with a Tandberg or Polycom VTC unit) that would make things much simpler in that you could simply plug your laptop into the VGA input. This could also get you better than POTS audio quality (8kHz mono). Very few conference rooms I've seen have bothered to set this up, though. Anyway, since they all speak H323, anyone with gnomemeeting or netmeeting should be able to join and watch and listen (albeit maybe at a lower quality, always test first:P ).
http://webex.com/ is another option, though I haven't played with their linux client yet. It can be a real dog with desktop updates (advancing a slide can take several seconds to update at all of the clients). However if you do it the right way and use their PPT preloader & displayer, things should be smooth. Like VNC, you'd want to coordinate desktop resolutions beforehand... it doesn't do any type of scaling.
Finally if you're into building your own thing, you can grab a video capture card such as http://www.unigraf.fi/?page=64 and use Windows Media Encoder, VideoLAN, etc. to deliver video content from any PC source to your clients using streaming video. Lots of testing and tweaking required, but you can basically take any full motion video or 3D content and chuck it over a network in multiple bit rates, have a recording to archive and playback later, etc. And all everyone needs is a media player. Mind that audio is only one-way.
The funny part is that this isn't the first time they've used this system. We voted on these machines in the 2004 elections, and there weren't any problems (well, other than that W got reelected, but the populous Montgomery, P.G. and Baltimore counties mentioned in the article all went to Kerry anyway: http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/sta tes/MD/P/00/ )
Guess they just weren't as careful the second time around.
These have typically gone by the name of PRT - "Personal Rapid Transit" systems. Google it for a lot more information on what these systems can ultimately achieve.
Back in the 70s, the big systems companies (later to be consumed by Raytheon, Boeing, etc.) was working on these mass transit systems to improve on some of the deficiencies of existing busses, subways, light rail, cars, taxicabs, etc. Ultimately they got out of the business by the 80s... I suppose municipalities aren't very visionary about such things, and it's probably much easier to just pour money into building more roads and federally-funded highways and pass/hide the vehicle costs to people to buy and maintain cars and not bother worrying about traffic congestion or pollution.
Anyway, there are a handful of PRT companies today (Ultra, Skytran, Taxi2000) still trying to push these systems out. Unfortunately, they seem responsible for lots of astroturf propaganda sites that all look and sound exactly the same. But ultimately, the decision to fund and build such broad advanced and integrated municipal systems are highly political. Yuck, politics.
So the only systems that seem to have a chance of being deployed are targetted towards campuses and airports. The only PRT-like thing in existence is a little 3-station tram system built by Boeing for WVU http://faculty.washington.edu/~jbs/itrans/morg.htm
But looks like Ultra is finally succeeding in putting more modern systems in Dubai and Heathrow. It's kinda ironic that these campus transit systems are primarily designed to shuttle people to and from a car parking lot:P
Oh well, one of these days we might have something that look and function a bit more like the PRT as shown in films like Minority Report. But it will take some visionary public officials to make it a priority, as well as some visionary systems engineering to define interface standards so the system can be smoothly maintained and upgraded over the decades. At least high fuel prices and increasing concern with environmentalism and sustainability may actually raise the public consciousness about this soon.
OK, so you'd have to develop in python mostly, but that's no big deal, right? It does a great job with all of the latest whiz-bang IDE features. I love the debugger, where you can just browse down the tree structures of your global and local objects. Searching, navigation for definitions/references in all of your modules and packages is a breeze. I also found out completely by accident that it keeps track of where you put all of our ## TODO: and ## FIXME: tags.
I really like the model of building in python first, (use psyco if you need the 10-100 extra speed), then profiling and rewrite just the things that need optimization in C.
This isn't about better education. Technology isn't about education. We're throwing a whole bunch of raw tools into a developing nation and stepping back to see what happens.
Which has precious little to do with the plot of the Diamond Age, but still, it makes you think.
I think this experiment is worthwhile just to observe how people adapt and react... Even if it's a complete failure in some way, it will be an interesting failure.
* Will they form a hive mind and advance technologically as a society?
* How will they change culturally? Will they become more global, or shed their own culture, or celebrate their own culture more?
* Will they just come to resent technology and lash back?
HD is usually at 60fps... 720p60 or 1080i60 . The numbers I usually see for uncompressed bandwidth reqs are 1.5Gbps (3.0 Gbps for 1080p60, which is why there isn't much that supports that yet unfortunately)
Also don't forget audio, though usually I guess you only have a few tracks of AC3 audio that add another 512kbps max each.
Anyway, at work I use VideoLAN to compress a 1280x720p30 video feed to a 4Mbps stream using MPEG4 without too much quantization during high-motion sequences.
So this is a fairly sophisticated package, but play around with some of the basic functions. Everything looks like a circuit diagram... just put your basic operators ( + - * / etc.) and pump in different inputs (start with constant numbers, then replace them with dials and stuff), and watch what happens to the output display (start with numbers, move up to gauges and graphs).
Eventually with enough money for extra hardware you'll have them building Lego robots.
They made us use this in college engineering projects and labs, and there were bits of it that were frustrating. But introduce the components a piece at a time, and the kids will be tinkering with all of the other functionality and figuring out the loopholes in no time.
My web site just has links to a PuTTY executable and an UltraVNC executable. Then I attach to my VNC session over an ssh tunnel and resume whatever I was doing exactly how it was when I last left it.
I suppose you could carry Port-a-PuTTY around to save you a few seconds of tunnel configuration each time.
The music is just there to keep me from forgetting to unplug my USB drive when I'm done.
There's one movie I can think of that can just about make me cry on demand... I don't remember what it was called, but it was in the DC Jewish Film festival a few years back. It was about an Israeli Taxi driver whose son recently committed suicide. Very short, very simple, and actually kinda boring until it hits you at the end.
OK, I gotta stop typing now, starting to tear up already... It was that powerful:>
I worked for a linux supercomputing startup way back when. The easiest time I had was by separating the components : one big machine for storage, and lots of little diskless machines for computation.
So I'm a Debian fan, so that involves just creating one large computer (or two with redundancy using linux-ha) with a good RAID as a shared home directory. Then just install the "diskless" package. This will allow you to spawn off as many hosts that mount root off of NFS as you like. All you have to do is get the compute nodes to boot a kernel that supports nfs root (I used a single floppy, but you can do bootcds or net-boot if you're more sophisticated).
I used a Mosix kernel at the time, but I suppose OpenMosix is a better bet today. Mosix pretty much makes the entire system look like a massive SMP, so you just launch a whole lot of batch scripts on one computer, and it automatically distributes the load out to idle machines, and ships the results back to the one you started on. You just choose a node to become the master diskless-image, and then use the diskless scripts to clone it as many times as you like.
The compute nodes could have a local drive, but I just used them for swap and maybe local/tmp. It's damn convenient to be able to configure all the nodes from one place whether they were online or not.
The other nice thing about OpenMosix is that it's architecture agnostic, so you could conceivable join and remove nodes that were all different speeds, AMDs or Intels or maybe even 64-bit platforms in any combination. The faster processors would get the heaviest loads first, etc.
After you have this system up and running, you might start playing with more sophisticated stuff, like parallel distributed global filesystems and the like. But before that you could certainly make your NFS root server scale up by splitting it up across multiple machines (for/home ,/usr, etc.). You'd be amazed at the performance you can get with a well tuned NFS share... since one server can cache most of the disk access, it can even dish out files from one big high performance RAID faster than if you had bothered to give all the nodes their own drive or two.
Anyway, it's the systems management that will get you... so I recommend using Debian, getting real cozy with aptitude, and searching the apt repository for all of the little command and monitoring thingies that will help you, like clusterssh and cfengine and nagios2 and stuff.
Burning a bunch of ClusterKnoppix CDs will pretty much get you on track with most of this, I'd imagine. Also check out the "KNOPPIX Remastering" howto so you can customize your own livecds, should you choose that path insteads of diskless nfsroot.
So that's a software approach, the hard part is really selecting, testing, and optimizing all of the hardware. The slowest component is always going to be storage (invest in lots of separate SATA cards using the Linux software RAID5 or RAID10 - reconfigure and test lots with hdparm -t and bonnie++ and format reiserfs), followed by network (gigabit NICs are cheap - you could afford separate ones for the NFS and the "real" network, though gigabit switches are still up there - Linksys and D-Link make some good 16-port ones for ~$300).
Um, if you're looking for parallel applications, povray is fun. And for a time we could sort of measure how many nodes I had up and running by monitoring my stats at distributed-net . But with OpenMosix, just about anything with lots of CPU-intensive parallel batch processing is fair game and works out of the box.
Have fun!
multimedia keyboard + xbindkeys
on
Favorite KDE Tricks?
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· Score: 2, Informative
xbindkeys is often used to do keyboard shortcuts under the X Window System. I used to use hotkeys (it has the OSD showing you what it's doing), but xbindkeys seems to be a bit more powerful.
I usually like to get a good multimedia keyboard with extra keys and use xbindkeys-config to bind them to some command. It's been a bit tricky to find one where all of the buttons work as expected, though. I'm happy with the current Dell multimedia keyboard (SK-SK8135 , ~$22) - the volume/media keys are backlit, and they didn't do anything stupid with the layout (like tranpose the ins/home/pgup block like in their/last/ multimedia keyboard). On some of the older keyboard models I've tried (HP 5219, Antec K361), all the keycodes wouldn't register, and the "sleep" button (which I usually bind to 'xset dpms force suspend') would send two events for some reason and usually wake itself right back up again (the dell mm kbd doesn't have a sleep button at all though).
I also have an X10 / ATi wireless usb remote that I've programmed some of the buttons on. Unfortunately, it has six buttons labelled 'a' through 'f' that just send those letters instead of keycodes, so it's hard to do anything with them.
Anyway, sorry for throwing out mostly hardware suggestions:P
At the big company I work for, Google search powers the intranet seach engine. On the other hand, almost all of the new websites being set up are done in Sharepoint. Due to export laws, just about everything has to be password protected on a per-user basis, to be sure that no unreviewed technical information (=pretty much everything) gets inadvertantly passed on to foreign national employees (everyone with an H1B visa or even US citizen workers who work for subsidiaries based in foreign countries).
So, pretty much, our internal Google search is useless for finding any useful information, because all of the most active stuff is closed away in Sharepoint. So the google search appliance is at a disadvantage until it can support user / group ACLs and stuff.
Google could handily beat MS at enterprise search once they beat them at groupware... which shouldn't be too hard, save for MS's tight sharepoint integration with Exchange/Outlook. Fortunately, Google appears to be advancing on all these fronts, so they have their work cut out for them. But in the mean time, it looks like the MS exec has a point.
We have a bunch of Canon VB-C10 's at work... full pan/tilt/zoom, and it runs embedded linux. The zoom works really well (you can read license plates in the parking lot from a camera mounted in a 4th floor office). The embedded webserver dishes out java viewers as well as several examples on how to embed still captures and preset captures into your own web pages. Ultimately these beasts will run you well over a grand USD, though.
If it was for me, I would simply attach a $150 USB Logitech Quickcam Orbit (there are Linux drivers for rudimentary PTZ) to a $250 USB-over-IP dongle, and have it run to a configured server. This would only give you USB1.0 framerates, though, so you might consider running a long USB2.0 extension cord (if you're within, say 10m) or a USB2.0-over-CAT5 extender (though these might be hard to come by too).
Anyway, have fun... I'm still pining for my wifi-controlled webcam robot with manipulator arm.
Well, I could think of a lot of ways to speed it up under Linux using various combinations of rsync, and... well, really just rsync. See if there's a good rsync clone for Win32 that will preserve your precious file attributes. Even running it under cygwin may be better in the long run, especially because inevitably (speaking from experience) your large copy will be interrupted halfway through by an "unreadable file" or some such rubbish, and you'll find yourself having to try to fix it and start the copy all over again from the beginning, or else trying to just transfer the remaining directories you think you're missing.
Using cygwin's rsync via ssh: (after running "ssh-host-config" on your new box and setting a "passwd" as Administrator )
will do the trick, and you can just keep running it over and over again until all the files are mirrored. It will take a long time to buld a list of all the files you need to transfer, but it will only tranfer the files you're missing, and will attempt to do some compression (which should help because you're more IO bound than CPU bound, but just remove the -z if your CPU is pegged). Plus, you'll find rsync & scp damn useful for many other common tasks you take on.
The bottleneck is probably your windows filesystem, and cygwin's extra abstraction layer will only make that worse. But using rsync under cygwin means you only have to transfer the files once - which will be a much bigger time saver than trying and failing to do the entire transfer several times.
If you were doing this often, I'm guessing you might see an improvement if you defragment your old drive first, but you obviously don't really want to waste time on that for a once and final transfer.
Also, the Windows TCP/IP stack is typically tuned for 2 - 10Mbps links. Here's some information on how to fix that: http://rdweb.cns.vt.edu/public/notes/win2k-tcpip.h tm It's mainly geared towards improving throughput on high-capacity WAN links, but parts are also relevant to achieving decent performance on 100Mbps+ networks as well. Also remember that a lot of network drivers suck too and are incapable of pushing the throughput even to a fraction of its rating... that's been a factor too, especially on cheap windows crap. An updated NIC driver/might/ get your net transfer to catch up with your firewire transfer somewhat.
Since you're getting 40Mbps / 400Mbps firewire, you're really not doing too bad. Converting to bytes, 5MB/s is a decent fraction of the 20MB/s to 50MB/s raw speed of your older hard drives, and actually seems reasonable given that you're sending lots of small files and not a few big ones where you can actually make good use of your drive's readahead cache.
OK, I'm not paranoid enough to have done this, but I would set up a VNC session that only accepted local connections (via an SSH tunnel).
Then use Port-a-PuTTY to connect and tunnel VNC to your box using passphrase authentication.
This way, the keyloggers only get the passphrase used to protect your Port-a-PuTTY's private key that (hopefully) stays on your thumbdrive / CDR. Perhaps there's someway to configure PuTTY to use a separate gold card that generates a rotating password.
Of course, you'd have to have your VNC session set up with a browser running that already remembers all of your passwords, so you don't have to enter them again through your unsecure keyboard.
I recommend tightvnc on *NIX and UltraVNC + cygwin's sshd on Win32
The only way I can think to improve upon this setup would be to just reboot the kiosk under a livecd like Knoppix, but of course this isn't always an option.
Familiar's Opie and GPE can help breathe new life into PDAs ( http://hackndev.com/palm/tx ) but they still seems somewhat limited compared to packages DSL provides...
It sounds like your management is actually trying to skimp on "telecommuting" money... if they offer to help maintain you employees' home machines, then the employees won't feel slighted about doing telecommuting work from home every once in a while.
The better solution would be to just bite the bullet and issue company standard laptops / desktops to your telecommuters. You retain complete control over the software and configuration, and can just offer them a replacement if they screw something up rather than have them sit around not telecommuting while they're waiting for you to diagnose their home PC problem.
If your management is sincerely offering the service as a "fringe benefit", then go for it... but it doesn't seem like it would make sense unless your company was in the business of fixing computers as a core competence and you had a large pool of extra techs sitting around playing with themselves otherwise. Most IT departments I've seen are too busy investing time into company infrastructure projects to have extra time to let techs sit around and screw with random computers.
Haven't played with Windows Mobile 5, but I'll add my exp points just because people will be reading.
For serious trips, I plug the laptop into our little AC inverter and use the full US Garmin MapPoint / NavPoint database. Without the laptop, I can drag my Garmin Legend around and leave it running so I still get to save my journey / hike track for later without worrying about running down the battery on my PDA. The database is great, my only serious gripe is that it doesn't seem to include subway stations.
Sometimes I also have Google Earth loaded with cached data... I'd be using Google Earth exclusively if they actually had a live GPS tracking module, and if the connection through my GPRS/EDGE mobile phone actually worked with the Google Earth servers.
For everyday reference, I have Mapopolis on my Palm T5. I keep most of my local maps loaded on an SD card. I haven't shelled out for a bluetooth GPS to hook up to it, so I basically just use it as a map. It takes a really long time to search for addresses and things unless you know what county (?!) to limit your active database to. So I really only use it as a pan/zoomable map (which it excels at on the Palm) and for very little else.
So I really like the usability of the Garmin software... I have much better experiences searching for addresses and facilities even using the hat switch on a virtual keyboard on my (old, old) Garmin Legend than I do on Mapopolis. Mapopolis doesn't even sort the list of results by distance from a location!
Does anyone know if there's a way to get the iQue software on my Palm T5 so I can use the same Garmin MapPoint database I've already paid for?
We have one of these. The server sits on a little 1U server and sucks video over IP from Axis cameras deployed wherever. The little Axis boxes run embedded Linux, and I think the server itself runs off a bootable LiveCD (I haven't really rebooted it much to check).
My wife was into sudoku for a week or two... it was starting to consume hours of each day. I simply whipped out a sudoku solver on my PDA. It wasn't the sort that would simply show the answer... it would just do the brute force process of elimination, and at each step, it would pencil in the potential answers. The game was reduced to simply setting in the cell with just one pencil mark, and re-running the process of elimination again. She quickly got bored and moved on with her life.
I'm pretty sure I've heard of nethack bots, just get a bunch of those, run them, and show her how they can do so much better over the hours automatically than she can while toiling away her time fruitlessly.
Well, its native resolution is 1920x1200 - which is incidentally the limit on the single link DVI-D spec. You'll probably want to run at 32 bits per pixel (8 bits for red, green, blue, and alpha transparency), so you'll need a card with at least 10 MB of RAM... most cards have much more than this (32MB +), the extra which can be used for offscreen buffers and stuff. So pretty much any decent card with DVI-I outputs will do for 2D. Probably best to stick to the ATis and NVidias, though, since I'm certain they will support that monitor's physical screen rotation feature.
Uh, you'll probably have to go pretty high end if you want decent 3D framerates at 1920x1200 with anti aliasing and stuff. But if you're looking for that, you pretty much have to set your price point ($100? $200? $300?) and go see what http://anandtech.com/ or http://tomshardware.com/ has to recommend.
Slashdot Mirror
I just snagged the Dell 2407WFP for about $800
Dell 2407WFP
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2006/06/23/Dell_
According to that review, it's generally the same as the Samsung 244T, though the Samsung has better color
Samsung 244T
http://www.trustedreviews.com/article.aspx?art=26
Healthcare or no, it's looking like the US's economy is moving to be solely based on intellectual property - patents, copyrights, licensing. Actual manufacturing and construction of anything will mostly occur abroad.
So, uh, how do we expect to maintain such a in the global economy? Seems like law enforcement and force are the only way. Not really sure what kind of national policy supports that. But Scary that.
VNC would be my first choice. Beware that even TightVNC and UltraVNC tend to automatically default to optimal settings for a LAN and not a WAN, so be sure to make all the clients check jpeg compression settings and test in advance. You'd want them to set their desktop resolution to match yours (the scaling sucks). With everything tuned, you'd get pretty good refresh rates, even with some modestly sized movies or animations. Mind that you'll have to find a separate channel to deliver audio.
:P ).
Next you might want to consider H323 conferencing... gnomemeeting, netmeeting, and the like. In addition to voice and webcams, they should give you desktop sharing, text chat, and a whiteboard and crap. (Under Windows XP, netmeeting is hidden but still available via "Run | conf.exe")
If you have a high-end corporate conference room setup (with a Tandberg or Polycom VTC unit) that would make things much simpler in that you could simply plug your laptop into the VGA input. This could also get you better than POTS audio quality (8kHz mono). Very few conference rooms I've seen have bothered to set this up, though. Anyway, since they all speak H323, anyone with gnomemeeting or netmeeting should be able to join and watch and listen (albeit maybe at a lower quality, always test first
http://webex.com/ is another option, though I haven't played with their linux client yet. It can be a real dog with desktop updates (advancing a slide can take several seconds to update at all of the clients). However if you do it the right way and use their PPT preloader & displayer, things should be smooth. Like VNC, you'd want to coordinate desktop resolutions beforehand... it doesn't do any type of scaling.
Finally if you're into building your own thing, you can grab a video capture card such as http://www.unigraf.fi/?page=64 and use Windows Media Encoder, VideoLAN, etc. to deliver video content from any PC source to your clients using streaming video. Lots of testing and tweaking required, but you can basically take any full motion video or 3D content and chuck it over a network in multiple bit rates, have a recording to archive and playback later, etc. And all everyone needs is a media player. Mind that audio is only one-way.
The funny part is that this isn't the first time they've used this system. We voted on these machines in the 2004 elections, and there weren't any problems (well, other than that W got reelected, but the populous Montgomery, P.G. and Baltimore counties mentioned in the article all went to Kerry anyway: http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/sta tes/MD/P/00/ )
Guess they just weren't as careful the second time around.
These have typically gone by the name of PRT - "Personal Rapid Transit" systems. Google it for a lot more information on what these systems can ultimately achieve.
m
:P
Back in the 70s, the big systems companies (later to be consumed by Raytheon, Boeing, etc.) was working on these mass transit systems to improve on some of the deficiencies of existing busses, subways, light rail, cars, taxicabs, etc. Ultimately they got out of the business by the 80s... I suppose municipalities aren't very visionary about such things, and it's probably much easier to just pour money into building more roads and federally-funded highways and pass/hide the vehicle costs to people to buy and maintain cars and not bother worrying about traffic congestion or pollution.
Anyway, there are a handful of PRT companies today (Ultra, Skytran, Taxi2000) still trying to push these systems out. Unfortunately, they seem responsible for lots of astroturf propaganda sites that all look and sound exactly the same. But ultimately, the decision to fund and build such broad advanced and integrated municipal systems are highly political. Yuck, politics.
So the only systems that seem to have a chance of being deployed are targetted towards campuses and airports. The only PRT-like thing in existence is a little 3-station tram system built by Boeing for WVU http://faculty.washington.edu/~jbs/itrans/morg.ht
But looks like Ultra is finally succeeding in putting more modern systems in Dubai and Heathrow. It's kinda ironic that these campus transit systems are primarily designed to shuttle people to and from a car parking lot
Oh well, one of these days we might have something that look and function a bit more like the PRT as shown in films like Minority Report. But it will take some visionary public officials to make it a priority, as well as some visionary systems engineering to define interface standards so the system can be smoothly maintained and upgraded over the decades. At least high fuel prices and increasing concern with environmentalism and sustainability may actually raise the public consciousness about this soon.
OK, so you'd have to develop in python mostly, but that's no big deal, right? It does a great job with all of the latest whiz-bang IDE features. I love the debugger, where you can just browse down the tree structures of your global and local objects. Searching, navigation for definitions/references in all of your modules and packages is a breeze. I also found out completely by accident that it keeps track of where you put all of our ## TODO: and ## FIXME: tags.
I really like the model of building in python first, (use psyco if you need the 10-100 extra speed), then profiling and rewrite just the things that need optimization in C.
Bonus points if your name is Eric too.
This isn't about better education. Technology isn't about education. We're throwing a whole bunch of raw tools into a developing nation and stepping back to see what happens.
Which has precious little to do with the plot of the Diamond Age, but still, it makes you think.
I think this experiment is worthwhile just to observe how people adapt and react... Even if it's a complete failure in some way, it will be an interesting failure.
* Will they form a hive mind and advance technologically as a society?
* How will they change culturally? Will they become more global, or shed their own culture, or celebrate their own culture more?
* Will they just come to resent technology and lash back?
HD is usually at 60fps ... 720p60 or 1080i60 . The numbers I usually see for uncompressed bandwidth reqs are 1.5Gbps (3.0 Gbps for 1080p60, which is why there isn't much that supports that yet unfortunately)
Also don't forget audio, though usually I guess you only have a few tracks of AC3 audio that add another 512kbps max each.
Anyway, at work I use VideoLAN to compress a 1280x720p30 video feed to a 4Mbps stream using MPEG4 without too much quantization during high-motion sequences.
http://www.ni.com/academic/
So this is a fairly sophisticated package, but play around with some of the basic functions. Everything looks like a circuit diagram... just put your basic operators ( + - * / etc.) and pump in different inputs (start with constant numbers, then replace them with dials and stuff), and watch what happens to the output display (start with numbers, move up to gauges and graphs).
Eventually with enough money for extra hardware you'll have them building Lego robots.
They made us use this in college engineering projects and labs, and there were bits of it that were frustrating. But introduce the components a piece at a time, and the kids will be tinkering with all of the other functionality and figuring out the loopholes in no time.
My web site just has links to a PuTTY executable and an UltraVNC executable. Then I attach to my VNC session over an ssh tunnel and resume whatever I was doing exactly how it was when I last left it.
I suppose you could carry Port-a-PuTTY around to save you a few seconds of tunnel configuration each time.
The music is just there to keep me from forgetting to unplug my USB drive when I'm done.
There's one movie I can think of that can just about make me cry on demand... I don't remember what it was called, but it was in the DC Jewish Film festival a few years back. It was about an Israeli Taxi driver whose son recently committed suicide. Very short, very simple, and actually kinda boring until it hits you at the end.
:>
OK, I gotta stop typing now, starting to tear up already... It was that powerful
I worked for a linux supercomputing startup way back when. The easiest time I had was by separating the components : one big machine for storage, and lots of little diskless machines for computation.
/tmp. It's damn convenient to be able to configure all the nodes from one place whether they were online or not.
/home , /usr, etc.). You'd be amazed at the performance you can get with a well tuned NFS share... since one server can cache most of the disk access, it can even dish out files from one big high performance RAID faster than if you had bothered to give all the nodes their own drive or two.
So I'm a Debian fan, so that involves just creating one large computer (or two with redundancy using linux-ha) with a good RAID as a shared home directory. Then just install the "diskless" package. This will allow you to spawn off as many hosts that mount root off of NFS as you like. All you have to do is get the compute nodes to boot a kernel that supports nfs root (I used a single floppy, but you can do bootcds or net-boot if you're more sophisticated).
I used a Mosix kernel at the time, but I suppose OpenMosix is a better bet today. Mosix pretty much makes the entire system look like a massive SMP, so you just launch a whole lot of batch scripts on one computer, and it automatically distributes the load out to idle machines, and ships the results back to the one you started on. You just choose a node to become the master diskless-image, and then use the diskless scripts to clone it as many times as you like.
The compute nodes could have a local drive, but I just used them for swap and maybe local
The other nice thing about OpenMosix is that it's architecture agnostic, so you could conceivable join and remove nodes that were all different speeds, AMDs or Intels or maybe even 64-bit platforms in any combination. The faster processors would get the heaviest loads first, etc.
After you have this system up and running, you might start playing with more sophisticated stuff, like parallel distributed global filesystems and the like. But before that you could certainly make your NFS root server scale up by splitting it up across multiple machines (for
Anyway, it's the systems management that will get you... so I recommend using Debian, getting real cozy with aptitude, and searching the apt repository for all of the little command and monitoring thingies that will help you, like clusterssh and cfengine and nagios2 and stuff.
Burning a bunch of ClusterKnoppix CDs will pretty much get you on track with most of this, I'd imagine. Also check out the "KNOPPIX Remastering" howto so you can customize your own livecds, should you choose that path insteads of diskless nfsroot.
So that's a software approach, the hard part is really selecting, testing, and optimizing all of the hardware. The slowest component is always going to be storage (invest in lots of separate SATA cards using the Linux software RAID5 or RAID10 - reconfigure and test lots with hdparm -t and bonnie++ and format reiserfs), followed by network (gigabit NICs are cheap - you could afford separate ones for the NFS and the "real" network, though gigabit switches are still up there - Linksys and D-Link make some good 16-port ones for ~$300).
Um, if you're looking for parallel applications, povray is fun. And for a time we could sort of measure how many nodes I had up and running by monitoring my stats at distributed-net . But with OpenMosix, just about anything with lots of CPU-intensive parallel batch processing is fair game and works out of the box.
Have fun!
xbindkeys is often used to do keyboard shortcuts under the X Window System. I used to use hotkeys (it has the OSD showing you what it's doing), but xbindkeys seems to be a bit more powerful.
/last/ multimedia keyboard). On some of the older keyboard models I've tried (HP 5219, Antec K361), all the keycodes wouldn't register, and the "sleep" button (which I usually bind to 'xset dpms force suspend') would send two events for some reason and usually wake itself right back up again (the dell mm kbd doesn't have a sleep button at all though).
:P
I usually like to get a good multimedia keyboard with extra keys and use xbindkeys-config to bind them to some command. It's been a bit tricky to find one where all of the buttons work as expected, though. I'm happy with the current Dell multimedia keyboard (SK-SK8135 , ~$22) - the volume/media keys are backlit, and they didn't do anything stupid with the layout (like tranpose the ins/home/pgup block like in their
I also have an X10 / ATi wireless usb remote that I've programmed some of the buttons on. Unfortunately, it has six buttons labelled 'a' through 'f' that just send those letters instead of keycodes, so it's hard to do anything with them.
Anyway, sorry for throwing out mostly hardware suggestions
At the big company I work for, Google search powers the intranet seach engine. On the other hand, almost all of the new websites being set up are done in Sharepoint. Due to export laws, just about everything has to be password protected on a per-user basis, to be sure that no unreviewed technical information (=pretty much everything) gets inadvertantly passed on to foreign national employees (everyone with an H1B visa or even US citizen workers who work for subsidiaries based in foreign countries).
So, pretty much, our internal Google search is useless for finding any useful information, because all of the most active stuff is closed away in Sharepoint. So the google search appliance is at a disadvantage until it can support user / group ACLs and stuff.
Google could handily beat MS at enterprise search once they beat them at groupware... which shouldn't be too hard, save for MS's tight sharepoint integration with Exchange/Outlook. Fortunately, Google appears to be advancing on all these fronts, so they have their work cut out for them. But in the mean time, it looks like the MS exec has a point.
We have a bunch of Canon VB-C10 's at work... full pan/tilt/zoom, and it runs embedded linux. The zoom works really well (you can read license plates in the parking lot from a camera mounted in a 4th floor office). The embedded webserver dishes out java viewers as well as several examples on how to embed still captures and preset captures into your own web pages. Ultimately these beasts will run you well over a grand USD, though.
If it was for me, I would simply attach a $150 USB Logitech Quickcam Orbit (there are Linux drivers for rudimentary PTZ) to a $250 USB-over-IP dongle, and have it run to a configured server. This would only give you USB1.0 framerates, though, so you might consider running a long USB2.0 extension cord (if you're within, say 10m) or a USB2.0-over-CAT5 extender (though these might be hard to come by too).
Anyway, have fun... I'm still pining for my wifi-controlled webcam robot with manipulator arm.
Well, I could think of a lot of ways to speed it up under Linux using various combinations of rsync, and... well, really just rsync. See if there's a good rsync clone for Win32 that will preserve your precious file attributes. Even running it under cygwin may be better in the long run, especially because inevitably (speaking from experience) your large copy will be interrupted halfway through by an "unreadable file" or some such rubbish, and you'll find yourself having to try to fix it and start the copy all over again from the beginning, or else trying to just transfer the remaining directories you think you're missing.
/cygdrive/c/pr0n/ Administrator@newxpbox:/cygdrive/c/pr0n/
h tm It's mainly geared towards improving throughput on high-capacity WAN links, but parts are also relevant to achieving decent performance on 100Mbps+ networks as well. Also remember that a lot of network drivers suck too and are incapable of pushing the throughput even to a fraction of its rating... that's been a factor too, especially on cheap windows crap. An updated NIC driver /might/ get your net transfer to catch up with your firewire transfer somewhat.
Using cygwin's rsync via ssh: (after running "ssh-host-config" on your new box and setting a "passwd" as Administrator )
rsync -azve ssh --progress
will do the trick, and you can just keep running it over and over again until all the files are mirrored. It will take a long time to buld a list of all the files you need to transfer, but it will only tranfer the files you're missing, and will attempt to do some compression (which should help because you're more IO bound than CPU bound, but just remove the -z if your CPU is pegged). Plus, you'll find rsync & scp damn useful for many other common tasks you take on.
The bottleneck is probably your windows filesystem, and cygwin's extra abstraction layer will only make that worse. But using rsync under cygwin means you only have to transfer the files once - which will be a much bigger time saver than trying and failing to do the entire transfer several times.
If you were doing this often, I'm guessing you might see an improvement if you defragment your old drive first, but you obviously don't really want to waste time on that for a once and final transfer.
Also, the Windows TCP/IP stack is typically tuned for 2 - 10Mbps links. Here's some information on how to fix that: http://rdweb.cns.vt.edu/public/notes/win2k-tcpip.
Since you're getting 40Mbps / 400Mbps firewire, you're really not doing too bad. Converting to bytes, 5MB/s is a decent fraction of the 20MB/s to 50MB/s raw speed of your older hard drives, and actually seems reasonable given that you're sending lots of small files and not a few big ones where you can actually make good use of your drive's readahead cache.
OK, I'm not paranoid enough to have done this, but I would set up a VNC session that only accepted local connections (via an SSH tunnel).
Then use Port-a-PuTTY to connect and tunnel VNC to your box using passphrase authentication.
This way, the keyloggers only get the passphrase used to protect your Port-a-PuTTY's private key that (hopefully) stays on your thumbdrive / CDR. Perhaps there's someway to configure PuTTY to use a separate gold card that generates a rotating password.
Of course, you'd have to have your VNC session set up with a browser running that already remembers all of your passwords, so you don't have to enter them again through your unsecure keyboard.
Anyway, link to Port-a-PuTTY:
http://socialistsushi.com/portaputty
I recommend tightvnc on *NIX and UltraVNC + cygwin's sshd on Win32
The only way I can think to improve upon this setup would be to just reboot the kiosk under a livecd like Knoppix, but of course this isn't always an option.
Familiar's Opie and GPE can help breathe new life into PDAs ( http://hackndev.com/palm/tx ) but they still seems somewhat limited compared to packages DSL provides...
It sounds like your management is actually trying to skimp on "telecommuting" money... if they offer to help maintain you employees' home machines, then the employees won't feel slighted about doing telecommuting work from home every once in a while.
The better solution would be to just bite the bullet and issue company standard laptops / desktops to your telecommuters. You retain complete control over the software and configuration, and can just offer them a replacement if they screw something up rather than have them sit around not telecommuting while they're waiting for you to diagnose their home PC problem.
If your management is sincerely offering the service as a "fringe benefit", then go for it... but it doesn't seem like it would make sense unless your company was in the business of fixing computers as a core competence and you had a large pool of extra techs sitting around playing with themselves otherwise. Most IT departments I've seen are too busy investing time into company infrastructure projects to have extra time to let techs sit around and screw with random computers.
Haven't played with Windows Mobile 5, but I'll add my exp points just because people will be reading.
For serious trips, I plug the laptop into our little AC inverter and use the full US Garmin MapPoint / NavPoint database. Without the laptop, I can drag my Garmin Legend around and leave it running so I still get to save my journey / hike track for later without worrying about running down the battery on my PDA. The database is great, my only serious gripe is that it doesn't seem to include subway stations.
Sometimes I also have Google Earth loaded with cached data... I'd be using Google Earth exclusively if they actually had a live GPS tracking module, and if the connection through my GPRS/EDGE mobile phone actually worked with the Google Earth servers.
For everyday reference, I have Mapopolis on my Palm T5. I keep most of my local maps loaded on an SD card. I haven't shelled out for a bluetooth GPS to hook up to it, so I basically just use it as a map. It takes a really long time to search for addresses and things unless you know what county (?!) to limit your active database to. So I really only use it as a pan/zoomable map (which it excels at on the Palm) and for very little else.
So I really like the usability of the Garmin software... I have much better experiences searching for addresses and facilities even using the hat switch on a virtual keyboard on my (old, old) Garmin Legend than I do on Mapopolis. Mapopolis doesn't even sort the list of results by distance from a location!
Does anyone know if there's a way to get the iQue software on my Palm T5 so I can use the same Garmin MapPoint database I've already paid for?
Some of you might also enjoy Hard 'n Phirm' http://pi.ytmnd.com/
We have one of these.
d ware/BMS.pdf
The server sits on a little 1U server and sucks video over IP from Axis cameras deployed wherever. The little Axis boxes run embedded Linux, and I think the server itself runs off a bootable LiveCD (I haven't really rebooted it much to check).
http://www.axis.com/
http://www.axis.com/adp_cd/adp_cd8/companies/broa
Oh well, at least we'll be able to find "videopodcast" content easier once this stuff goes mainstream.
My wife was into sudoku for a week or two... it was starting to consume hours of each day. I simply whipped out a sudoku solver on my PDA. It wasn't the sort that would simply show the answer... it would just do the brute force process of elimination, and at each step, it would pencil in the potential answers. The game was reduced to simply setting in the cell with just one pencil mark, and re-running the process of elimination again. She quickly got bored and moved on with her life.
I'm pretty sure I've heard of nethack bots, just get a bunch of those, run them, and show her how they can do so much better over the hours automatically than she can while toiling away her time fruitlessly.
Well, its native resolution is 1920x1200 - which is incidentally the limit on the single link DVI-D spec. You'll probably want to run at 32 bits per pixel (8 bits for red, green, blue, and alpha transparency), so you'll need a card with at least 10 MB of RAM... most cards have much more than this (32MB +), the extra which can be used for offscreen buffers and stuff. So pretty much any decent card with DVI-I outputs will do for 2D. Probably best to stick to the ATis and NVidias, though, since I'm certain they will support that monitor's physical screen rotation feature.
Uh, you'll probably have to go pretty high end if you want decent 3D framerates at 1920x1200 with anti aliasing and stuff. But if you're looking for that, you pretty much have to set your price point ($100? $200? $300?) and go see what http://anandtech.com/ or http://tomshardware.com/ has to recommend.