love my standing desk at the office. But the important part is to be able to switch as needed resp. wanted: after lunch I prefer to stand. In the afternoon I prefer to sit. When thinking, I like to stand, but for mundane tasks sitting is better. Also I learned that standing all day is really bad for my shoulder. While sitting all day is bad for my back.
There's zero exercise going on here though, but that was never my point why I wanted it.
If you lie on a sheet of paper and at the end it says "I confirm that all I wrote above is best to my best knowledge", and I bet it has that on it, then anything wrong there which might be done on purpose, which is a lie by all definitions (except one currently popular one), HR will find out and simply reject you, even if you pass every future interview.
Do not mess with this. Leave it empty.
Now can i provide a PWM signal to a 4 pin 12Vdc computer fan with an arduino? because it is looking like a 555 timer won't make the high frequencies(24khz i think) that the PWM fans need.
Yes you can. Not exactly 24kHz. But 32kHz. Which works very well with the Owltech fan (4 pin) I have.
http://www.formfactors.org/developer%5Cspecs%5C4_Wire_PWM_Spec.pdf says: 21-28kHz. When I use lower frequencies I can hear a buzzing. It worked at 500Hz just fine, with the exception of the slight but annoying noise. Running the fan at 32kHz PWM works fine. No noise, and the fan spins fast and slow as required.
I can highly recommend this: let people meet once in a while. One member from each country visiting one other office. So for 4 office locations, 4 people need to travel per year, e.g. for one week. Makes a huge difference if within some years everyone has met everyone else.
We have regular video conferences including some fancy Telepresence meetings (highly recommended when face-to-face meetings are not possible due to costs). Nothing replaces personal meetings though.
I second this. Instead of working to earn money to pay someone, you can do it yourself in the first place.
Back in my home country it is (in the country side) common to let someone (AKA people who know what they are doing) build the outer part of a house (basement, cellar, walls, roof) and some other important or safety-critical parts like heating system, staircases, electric wiring (not allowed to do without proper qualification) and water pipes (you don't want them to leak in 5 years), and maybe finish enough rooms to live inside the house (kitchen, bathroom, one bedroom, living room), and then do the rest yourself.
There are enough books to read about the needed tools and skills.
The best part about this is when later something breaks, you have the tools and knowledge to fix many problems yourself.
And carpenters and related jobs are unpopular enough (no one wants to learn this type of work any more) that there is enough shortage of those people so that their hourly rates are surprisingly high and they get away with it. So it's a nice "Plan B" in case your current computer related job no longer earns you enough.
Well, not exactly wrong, but Matrox has a 64 Bit 66MHz PCI card to which PCI-X is very compatible (and it's 4 times as fast as standard PCI): Here
It's not PCI-X, but it's pretty close.
I hope your are being sarcastic as all attacks from the Internet are being redirected to your laptop via NAT. That is, unless that router can do something else like filtering ports to that laptop.
And, equally important, provide a second, different authentication mechanism to support the password security (a hardware token system would be one example, biometrics would be another, a prearranged "callback" mechanism would be a third, there are many others).
I wholehearly second this. I've been long enough in the computer business to see lots of good and bad password (or equivalent) schemes. From th standard "lower/upper case, one digit, one special char, at least 6 chars long, non-repeating, checking with dictionary) to hardware tokens a la RSA (infact only RSA tokens). The more restirictive the password part gets, the more likely users write it down somewhere. It's natural and whoever is ignorant of the lazyness of people, is doomed. Of course people told collegues their password so they could receive their mails. Passwords printes on post-it notes attached on the monitor or below the keyboard. You know it.
This all is impossible with a hardware token. The only exception is when someone gives their token to a collegue. Company policy must forbid this, or the token is used when entering/leaving the company building. Beside the need to have a small electonic device (with yearly charges), a much easier password needs to be used in conjuction with the number displayed on the token. And there you go: simple, easy to remember password, always unique, impossible to write down and share. Even when stolen it's not that useful as it's easily deactivateable on the authentication server side, and without the (simple) password, it's useless.
Now use this in a single sign-on system (LDAP comes into mind as almost everything which looks like a computer can handle LDAP, especially since MS Active Directory), and all problems (except the yearly bill) go away. But compared to the costs of a potential security leak/data theft, they are not that expensive.
I wonder why this is not in use in about every company which is concerned about security and especially password security...anyone knows why? It can't be the costs, can it be? For a 5 people company it's expensive, but for anything more than 100 people the additional costs are next to nothing, right?
That's called, "having all your eggs in 1 basket", and we all know what a bad idea that is...
About the booting part: at work we boot from local disks because we Unix SAs don't have control of the EMCs, thus if a machine does not boot, we cannot do much beside calling someone who has no idea about Sparc machines. If we Unix SAs were able to control the EMCs and everything related like the FC switches, then we would boot directly from SAN. If I were able to control the iSCSI storage box, the routers and switches for the iSCSI SAN, then I see no problem of not booting off the local disks. After all, if a machine does boot but all the data and apps is not reachable, the machine is not very useful. A not booting machine is not much better.
What if your card gets stolen. Any idiot can probably use it to connect to all of your accounts, without effort
Of course you'd need a PIN/password to use the card.
It only takes 1 person at microsoft to trip on a cable then for all of your logins to fail.
They invented redundancy some time ago. Look at DNS: one server down, many still available and the whole DNS system works without a hickup
unlike a keylogger, the answer wont be obfuscated, you can just monitor the smartcard port, capture all the details sent, and you dont even need the smartcard.. You just emulate the smartcard hardware and fake the connection to the card, easy.
Of course the communication is encrypted. With the private key on the card. Where it stays and there's (hopefully) no way to get it out. Thus the card signs a message (a random message) and there you go. Only the card can sign something with its private key. And sniffing the ports will not help as it's always different.
I do agree that Microsoft controlling my identity is something I will not like. Nor any other commercially working company. But then I do not see why this is needed. I 'd like to have a private key (generated myself) put into hardware I can trust (that's a difficult part), I put my public key somewhere at some sites I trust (not just one, not just.NET) and then I can sign anything I like and everyone can verify it's me. Logging on computers is then pretty simple: people get my public key and allow the owner of the private key to log in on a certain computer/network.
The programming part is IMHO simple. Building the hardware in a useable way (trustable, cheap, secure, no backdoors) is difficult. Especially if you cannot afford a custom made SmartCard.
Re:Cisco 1300 or 1400
on
WiFi Bridging?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
just remember that you'll get better quality when you buy quality hardware.
While I can generally confirm this, and I certainly like my Cisco AP, this is an overkill-solution-par-excellence. Of course you can go to work with a comfortable car and of course it's faster than a bicycle and of course it will be more expensive, but when your office is 1km away, this does not make any sense at all. Cisco bridges are great just like Cisco routers/switches etc., but I would not recomment anyone to buy a Cisco router/switch for private and small networks. It's just not worth it and most people cannot use nor do they need all those nice features. In a company, stay away from generic stuff with only web interfaces and get the good, expensive Cisco & Co stuff, but at home it's the opposite way.
I had a similar problem (2 networks to be bridged, albeit shorter distance) and I did this:
Set the access point on once side of the network (that was the simple part)
Set a Soekris 4521 with a CardBus WLAN card on the other network
Let the Soekris connect via WLAN card to AP
Bridge traffic between ath0 (the WLAN card) and eth0 (the onboard-LAN).
Use eth1 for connecting to the Soekris for management purposes, but I can easily live without it as it works reliably.
Costs: I had the AP, I had the Soekris box, I had a PoE adapter, I had to buy a CardBus Linux supported WLAN card (Atheros) as I could not use the PCMCIA Prism card I had. Costs for me: 7000 Yen (approx. US$70). Costs for someone without all this stuff: about US$400 for all of it,
which includes a Soekris board which is likely overkill for this one job. But it's very reuseable, so I could this as an investment.
Another option was the purchase of a Ethernet-WLAN bridge (connects to an Ethernet port, has a small computer inside with WLAN on the other side, and it's simply bridging stuff from left to right and right to left, just like the Soekris does). Costs 9000 Yen here in Japan. But it only good for one Ethernet port (1 PC, not a network).
Both beats paying US$3000 for a Cisco bridge set and the former is far more versatile while the latter is easiest to set up (if 1 PC is all you need). Setting up thr Soekris is dead-easy if you've ever set up Linux routing/bridging/WLAN, before.
Did you click on the second link in the story? There's a lot for Windows See under "Operating Systems".
Given the fact that I don't use MacOSX, I checked out the Cisco one some time ago and it's quite impressive. Lots of common sense things of course, but some good ideas I would have otherwise not thought about. Definitely recommended.
It's nice to see government agencies not waste our (sorry: your) tax dollars and instead produce something useful and not hiding it in one of their many shelfs.
Those offerings from Rocketcalc are dual Operon boards with orginary clustering. The only difference is, they put them in one case. A 4 CPU or 8 CPU Opteron box is far more expensive. of course a 8 CPU Itanium2 is expensive too. But comparing a bunch of (commodity) dual CPU boards with one 8 CPU box is not fair. It's the often found apple-and-oranges-comparison comparison.
Point in case: MTF (Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi). In Tokyo those shares can be bought for roughly 1M Yen (about US$8000). See here
That's the price for one share. Makes you think twice about getting those.
The two on-board connectors are "high speed" devices, which don't like to be transported by a cheap cable/connector. Don't think about connecting a monitor via a flat ribbon cable to a VGA header as the signal will be messy. The only way to get a descent signal quality, it to use a solid connector and a good cable. Both of them are way more expensive than an on-board VGA plug.
I personally think their choice is well chosen. VGA/network is something you want on the back as it's ugly, but needed. Anything else (e.g. USB ports) can be relocated to whereever you please it.
I'm here in Japan for some years now and I've never seen fog as in "I cannot see 50m far". Smog, yes. Dirty air, yes. Raining so hard, you cannot see 100m, yes. Cannot see mountains 5km far away on most days, yes.
but as a general rule wireless always adds 20ms to your ping
Where does that 20ms number come from. My personal WLAN has about 0.9ms to the router,
1.7ms to the access point, and 2.8ms to another computer which is only connected via WLAN. So make it 2 instead of 20, and I can agree with you.
I get a 15ms ping to the router on the other side of the ADSL line I use. Now if that could be cut in half...
Linux makes an OK home firewall. But I wouldn't use it anywhere near a business.
I have to question this. Given the few arguments named, it's easy to do so. I built lots of routers with and without VPN (FreeS/WAN and recently Racoon), proxy services (for http, ftp, mail), firewalls doing NAT, VPN and anything else you can imagine. Customers read about a feature on Cisco routers/PIX and they want to have this suddenly. It often does not make much sense, but the customer is king. (I don't connect to T1s directly though, always Ethernet-only, avoiding T1/T3 with provider supplied routers which output Ethernet and don't do anything else, and everything is data-only, no voice (VoIP counts as data)).
Problems so far: 0, except hardware failures. That's my about 5 years of experience in this business.
No router was 0wn3d, we patch them regularily when there is a security patch needed, the firewall is pretty safe and closed, no outages, even when hundreds of notebooks connect to them.
Collegues have way more problems with Cisco PIX/Checkpoint firewalls. So if Cisco & Co is ready for business, then Linux is ready too.
I do know that *BSD is working well too and I very much like the ports system, but there is nothing wrong with Linux and e.g. Gentoo. Both run stable and outperform all but the most expensive Cisco/Checkpoint gears I know.
OpenFirmware is all nice and dandy (I use it on Sun and Macs) and I'd love to use it on anything which resembles a PC (not so much on desktop machines, but very much on server like machines), however I have yet to see a OpenFirmware implementation I could use.
I know there are implementations for embedded computers and hardware which requires some sort of BIOS (non-PC compatible stuff), but no need for that. So far FreeBSD has something useable with their bootloader, but it of course depends on the BIOS of the machine to boot the bootloader, which is not what I would like to have.
Is there an OpenFirmware implementation available for PC compatible hardware? If there is (I don't care if it's free or not as long as it's not more expensive than a new mainboard.)
If possible, use the network. If those PCs have PXE to boot from, that is by far the easiest and customizeable way to install lots of Linux machines. Using RedHat's kickstart, I can install a basic server in about 5 minutes, plus 5 minutes to configure everything for that machine. It's thus faster than CD and easier and easy to customize. No need to burn a new CD.
Whats to stop an attacker connecting through the tunnel to the noip'd box?
The box itself will stop such traffic (only if it's a known exploit though). The bad traffic usually comes from outside. The management and this tunnel is supposed to connect from the internal network. The problem with such bridging boxes is, they either don't have an IP address and are only administratable via the console or configurable via booting/floppy/CD, or they have another interface with a secure network to administer. Switches usually have a dedicated network for their administration. In the latter case, the box has an IP address. In all cases, administration is not supposed to be done via an in-band network connection.
The whole point of this noiptun is to get rid of this extra interface which is usually needed to do some kind of administration.
I've got a Canon IDX-9600 which is suitable as a Japanese-English dictionary (for Japanese people), but it can be switched to have an english menu and it can translate English in Japanese too (as all those dictionaries can), but it also shows you the Hiragana reading of japanese Kanji (which most electonic dictionaries don't do, as Japanese can read the Kanjis).
This makes it perfect for using as a non-Japanese speaker. The only drawback of that IDX-9600 is the slow speed (turn it, on, wait 1 second, push keys, but not too fast) and the medicore display.
I recenly got a Japanese-English-German electronic dictionary from Sharp (XD-R7100) which is much faster, much better display, can do English and German (bonus for me), but when I translate something into Japanese, I don't know how to read the Kanji (I can find out, but it takes about 10 key presses). This machine is clearly made for Japanese, not foreigners.
Those prices are outdated. Sun nowadays (is forced to) have cheaper models. Compared to brand-name x86-based servers they are not much more expensive any more. V440 (4 CPUs, 8GB RAM, 4 36GB SCSI disks, redundant PSU) list price US$16000.
No, it's not cheap and it certainly cannot compete with an off-the-shelf dual-CPU Xeon, but 4 CPUs are more expensive then 2 times 2. A Dell PowerEdge 6650 with 4 Xeon 2MHz and similar specs is available at US$17500.
And once you go beyond 4 CPUs, everything is pretty expensive. Sun is no exception here.
The article makes it sound like no one older than 30(!) can enjoy playing computer games...I'm even older...
Anyway, my experience is, as it's also written in the article, once you work, you have more money but less time. Once you have family and children, there's less money again, and even less time. But friends of mine used to do small LAN parties (50% of the time playing games, the rest was spent by BBQing, eating, drinking, talking) and they were older than 30(!). Some even had children. You don't do this every week, but once in 2 months is fine. And it was much fun.
Also once you get older, you don't play games to win or tell your friends you finished a game faster than they did. Playing for play's sake.
And yes, I play my GameboyAdvance in the subway when I have nothing else to do. And I am rarely the only one doing that. It's nice to live in Japan:-)
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love my standing desk at the office. But the important part is to be able to switch as needed resp. wanted: after lunch I prefer to stand. In the afternoon I prefer to sit. When thinking, I like to stand, but for mundane tasks sitting is better. Also I learned that standing all day is really bad for my shoulder. While sitting all day is bad for my back. There's zero exercise going on here though, but that was never my point why I wanted it.
If you lie on a sheet of paper and at the end it says "I confirm that all I wrote above is best to my best knowledge", and I bet it has that on it, then anything wrong there which might be done on purpose, which is a lie by all definitions (except one currently popular one), HR will find out and simply reject you, even if you pass every future interview. Do not mess with this. Leave it empty.
Now can i provide a PWM signal to a 4 pin 12Vdc computer fan with an arduino? because it is looking like a 555 timer won't make the high frequencies(24khz i think) that the PWM fans need.
Yes you can. Not exactly 24kHz. But 32kHz. Which works very well with the Owltech fan (4 pin) I have. http://www.formfactors.org/developer%5Cspecs%5C4_Wire_PWM_Spec.pdf says: 21-28kHz. When I use lower frequencies I can hear a buzzing. It worked at 500Hz just fine, with the exception of the slight but annoying noise. Running the fan at 32kHz PWM works fine. No noise, and the fan spins fast and slow as required.
I can highly recommend this: let people meet once in a while. One member from each country visiting one other office. So for 4 office locations, 4 people need to travel per year, e.g. for one week. Makes a huge difference if within some years everyone has met everyone else. We have regular video conferences including some fancy Telepresence meetings (highly recommended when face-to-face meetings are not possible due to costs). Nothing replaces personal meetings though.
I second this. Instead of working to earn money to pay someone, you can do it yourself in the first place.
Back in my home country it is (in the country side) common to let someone (AKA people who know what they are doing) build the outer part of a house (basement, cellar, walls, roof) and some other important or safety-critical parts like heating system, staircases, electric wiring (not allowed to do without proper qualification) and water pipes (you don't want them to leak in 5 years), and maybe finish enough rooms to live inside the house (kitchen, bathroom, one bedroom, living room), and then do the rest yourself.
There are enough books to read about the needed tools and skills.
The best part about this is when later something breaks, you have the tools and knowledge to fix many problems yourself.
And carpenters and related jobs are unpopular enough (no one wants to learn this type of work any more) that there is enough shortage of those people so that their hourly rates are surprisingly high and they get away with it. So it's a nice "Plan B" in case your current computer related job no longer earns you enough.
Well, not exactly wrong, but Matrox has a 64 Bit 66MHz PCI card to which PCI-X is very compatible (and it's 4 times as fast as standard PCI): Here It's not PCI-X, but it's pretty close.
I hope your are being sarcastic as all attacks from the Internet are being redirected to your laptop via NAT. That is, unless that router can do something else like filtering ports to that laptop.
And, equally important, provide a second, different authentication mechanism to support the password security (a hardware token system would be one example, biometrics would be another, a prearranged "callback" mechanism would be a third, there are many others).
I wholehearly second this. I've been long enough in the computer business to see lots of good and bad password (or equivalent) schemes. From th standard "lower/upper case, one digit, one special char, at least 6 chars long, non-repeating, checking with dictionary) to hardware tokens a la RSA (infact only RSA tokens). The more restirictive the password part gets, the more likely users write it down somewhere. It's natural and whoever is ignorant of the lazyness of people, is doomed. Of course people told collegues their password so they could receive their mails. Passwords printes on post-it notes attached on the monitor or below the keyboard. You know it.
This all is impossible with a hardware token. The only exception is when someone gives their token to a collegue. Company policy must forbid this, or the token is used when entering/leaving the company building. Beside the need to have a small electonic device (with yearly charges), a much easier password needs to be used in conjuction with the number displayed on the token. And there you go: simple, easy to remember password, always unique, impossible to write down and share. Even when stolen it's not that useful as it's easily deactivateable on the authentication server side, and without the (simple) password, it's useless.
Now use this in a single sign-on system (LDAP comes into mind as almost everything which looks like a computer can handle LDAP, especially since MS Active Directory), and all problems (except the yearly bill) go away. But compared to the costs of a potential security leak/data theft, they are not that expensive.
I wonder why this is not in use in about every company which is concerned about security and especially password security...anyone knows why? It can't be the costs, can it be? For a 5 people company it's expensive, but for anything more than 100 people the additional costs are next to nothing, right?
That's called, "having all your eggs in 1 basket", and we all know what a bad idea that is...
About the booting part: at work we boot from local disks because we Unix SAs don't have control of the EMCs, thus if a machine does not boot, we cannot do much beside calling someone who has no idea about Sparc machines. If we Unix SAs were able to control the EMCs and everything related like the FC switches, then we would boot directly from SAN. If I were able to control the iSCSI storage box, the routers and switches for the iSCSI SAN, then I see no problem of not booting off the local disks. After all, if a machine does boot but all the data and apps is not reachable, the machine is not very useful. A not booting machine is not much better.
Wow...so many things wrong.
What if your card gets stolen. Any idiot can probably use it to connect to all of your accounts, without effort
Of course you'd need a PIN/password to use the card.
It only takes 1 person at microsoft to trip on a cable then for all of your logins to fail.
They invented redundancy some time ago. Look at DNS: one server down, many still available and the whole DNS system works without a hickup
unlike a keylogger, the answer wont be obfuscated, you can just monitor the smartcard port, capture all the details sent, and you dont even need the smartcard.. You just emulate the smartcard hardware and fake the connection to the card, easy.
Of course the communication is encrypted. With the private key on the card. Where it stays and there's (hopefully) no way to get it out. Thus the card signs a message (a random message) and there you go. Only the card can sign something with its private key. And sniffing the ports will not help as it's always different.
I do agree that Microsoft controlling my identity is something I will not like. Nor any other commercially working company. But then I do not see why this is needed. I 'd like to have a private key (generated myself) put into hardware I can trust (that's a difficult part), I put my public key somewhere at some sites I trust (not just one, not just .NET) and then I can sign anything I like and everyone can verify it's me. Logging on computers is then pretty simple: people get my public key and allow the owner of the private key to log in on a certain computer/network.
The programming part is IMHO simple. Building the hardware in a useable way (trustable, cheap, secure, no backdoors) is difficult. Especially if you cannot afford a custom made SmartCard.
just remember that you'll get better quality when you buy quality hardware.
While I can generally confirm this, and I certainly like my Cisco AP, this is an overkill-solution-par-excellence. Of course you can go to work with a comfortable car and of course it's faster than a bicycle and of course it will be more expensive, but when your office is 1km away, this does not make any sense at all. Cisco bridges are great just like Cisco routers/switches etc., but I would not recomment anyone to buy a Cisco router/switch for private and small networks. It's just not worth it and most people cannot use nor do they need all those nice features. In a company, stay away from generic stuff with only web interfaces and get the good, expensive Cisco & Co stuff, but at home it's the opposite way.
I had a similar problem (2 networks to be bridged, albeit shorter distance) and I did this:
- Set the access point on once side of the network (that was the simple part)
- Set a Soekris 4521 with a CardBus WLAN card on the other network
- Let the Soekris connect via WLAN card to AP
- Bridge traffic between ath0 (the WLAN card) and eth0 (the onboard-LAN).
- Use eth1 for connecting to the Soekris for management purposes, but I can easily live without it as it works reliably.
Costs: I had the AP, I had the Soekris box, I had a PoE adapter, I had to buy a CardBus Linux supported WLAN card (Atheros) as I could not use the PCMCIA Prism card I had. Costs for me: 7000 Yen (approx. US$70). Costs for someone without all this stuff: about US$400 for all of it, which includes a Soekris board which is likely overkill for this one job. But it's very reuseable, so I could this as an investment.Another option was the purchase of a Ethernet-WLAN bridge (connects to an Ethernet port, has a small computer inside with WLAN on the other side, and it's simply bridging stuff from left to right and right to left, just like the Soekris does). Costs 9000 Yen here in Japan. But it only good for one Ethernet port (1 PC, not a network).
Both beats paying US$3000 for a Cisco bridge set and the former is far more versatile while the latter is easiest to set up (if 1 PC is all you need). Setting up thr Soekris is dead-easy if you've ever set up Linux routing/bridging/WLAN, before.
Did you click on the second link in the story? There's a lot for Windows See under "Operating Systems".
Given the fact that I don't use MacOSX, I checked out the Cisco one some time ago and it's quite impressive. Lots of common sense things of course, but some good ideas I would have otherwise not thought about. Definitely recommended.
It's nice to see government agencies not waste our (sorry: your) tax dollars and instead produce something useful and not hiding it in one of their many shelfs.
Those offerings from Rocketcalc are dual Operon boards with orginary clustering. The only difference is, they put them in one case. A 4 CPU or 8 CPU Opteron box is far more expensive. of course a 8 CPU Itanium2 is expensive too. But comparing a bunch of (commodity) dual CPU boards with one 8 CPU box is not fair. It's the often found apple-and-oranges-comparison comparison.
Point in case: MTF (Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi). In Tokyo those shares can be bought for roughly 1M Yen (about US$8000). See here That's the price for one share. Makes you think twice about getting those.
The two on-board connectors are "high speed" devices, which don't like to be transported by a cheap cable/connector. Don't think about connecting a monitor via a flat ribbon cable to a VGA header as the signal will be messy. The only way to get a descent signal quality, it to use a solid connector and a good cable. Both of them are way more expensive than an on-board VGA plug.
I personally think their choice is well chosen. VGA/network is something you want on the back as it's ugly, but needed. Anything else (e.g. USB ports) can be relocated to whereever you please it.
I'm here in Japan for some years now and I've never seen fog as in "I cannot see 50m far". Smog, yes. Dirty air, yes. Raining so hard, you cannot see 100m, yes. Cannot see mountains 5km far away on most days, yes.
But fog, no.but as a general rule wireless always adds 20ms to your ping
Where does that 20ms number come from. My personal WLAN has about 0.9ms to the router, 1.7ms to the access point, and 2.8ms to another computer which is only connected via WLAN. So make it 2 instead of 20, and I can agree with you.
I get a 15ms ping to the router on the other side of the ADSL line I use. Now if that could be cut in half...
I really wish Rio would start selling extra docks for the Karma
They have them: http://www.rioaudio.jp/products/rioKARMA.html
It might be not available where you live, but those extra base stations do exist and they are not even expensive at 4500 Yen (about US$40).
Linux makes an OK home firewall. But I wouldn't use it anywhere near a business.
I have to question this. Given the few arguments named, it's easy to do so. I built lots of routers with and without VPN (FreeS/WAN and recently Racoon), proxy services (for http, ftp, mail), firewalls doing NAT, VPN and anything else you can imagine. Customers read about a feature on Cisco routers/PIX and they want to have this suddenly. It often does not make much sense, but the customer is king. (I don't connect to T1s directly though, always Ethernet-only, avoiding T1/T3 with provider supplied routers which output Ethernet and don't do anything else, and everything is data-only, no voice (VoIP counts as data)).
Problems so far: 0, except hardware failures. That's my about 5 years of experience in this business.
No router was 0wn3d, we patch them regularily when there is a security patch needed, the firewall is pretty safe and closed, no outages, even when hundreds of notebooks connect to them. Collegues have way more problems with Cisco PIX/Checkpoint firewalls. So if Cisco & Co is ready for business, then Linux is ready too.
I do know that *BSD is working well too and I very much like the ports system, but there is nothing wrong with Linux and e.g. Gentoo. Both run stable and outperform all but the most expensive Cisco/Checkpoint gears I know.
OpenFirmware is all nice and dandy (I use it on Sun and Macs) and I'd love to use it on anything which resembles a PC (not so much on desktop machines, but very much on server like machines), however I have yet to see a OpenFirmware implementation I could use.
I know there are implementations for embedded computers and hardware which requires some sort of BIOS (non-PC compatible stuff), but no need for that. So far FreeBSD has something useable with their bootloader, but it of course depends on the BIOS of the machine to boot the bootloader, which is not what I would like to have.
Is there an OpenFirmware implementation available for PC compatible hardware? If there is (I don't care if it's free or not as long as it's not more expensive than a new mainboard.)
If possible, use the network. If those PCs have PXE to boot from, that is by far the easiest and customizeable way to install lots of Linux machines. Using RedHat's kickstart, I can install a basic server in about 5 minutes, plus 5 minutes to configure everything for that machine. It's thus faster than CD and easier and easy to customize. No need to burn a new CD.
Whats to stop an attacker connecting through the tunnel to the noip'd box?
The box itself will stop such traffic (only if it's a known exploit though). The bad traffic usually comes from outside. The management and this tunnel is supposed to connect from the internal network. The problem with such bridging boxes is, they either don't have an IP address and are only administratable via the console or configurable via booting/floppy/CD, or they have another interface with a secure network to administer. Switches usually have a dedicated network for their administration. In the latter case, the box has an IP address. In all cases, administration is not supposed to be done via an in-band network connection.
The whole point of this noiptun is to get rid of this extra interface which is usually needed to do some kind of administration.
I've got a Canon IDX-9600 which is suitable as a Japanese-English dictionary (for Japanese people), but it can be switched to have an english menu and it can translate English in Japanese too (as all those dictionaries can), but it also shows you the Hiragana reading of japanese Kanji (which most electonic dictionaries don't do, as Japanese can read the Kanjis).
This makes it perfect for using as a non-Japanese speaker. The only drawback of that IDX-9600 is the slow speed (turn it, on, wait 1 second, push keys, but not too fast) and the medicore display.
I recenly got a Japanese-English-German electronic dictionary from Sharp (XD-R7100) which is much faster, much better display, can do English and German (bonus for me), but when I translate something into Japanese, I don't know how to read the Kanji (I can find out, but it takes about 10 key presses). This machine is clearly made for Japanese, not foreigners.
Those prices are outdated. Sun nowadays (is forced to) have cheaper models. Compared to brand-name x86-based servers they are not much more expensive any more. V440 (4 CPUs, 8GB RAM, 4 36GB SCSI disks, redundant PSU) list price US$16000.
No, it's not cheap and it certainly cannot compete with an off-the-shelf dual-CPU Xeon, but 4 CPUs are more expensive then 2 times 2. A Dell PowerEdge 6650 with 4 Xeon 2MHz and similar specs is available at US$17500.
And once you go beyond 4 CPUs, everything is pretty expensive. Sun is no exception here.
The article makes it sound like no one older than 30(!) can enjoy playing computer games...I'm even older...
Anyway, my experience is, as it's also written in the article, once you work, you have more money but less time. Once you have family and children, there's less money again, and even less time. But friends of mine used to do small LAN parties (50% of the time playing games, the rest was spent by BBQing, eating, drinking, talking) and they were older than 30(!). Some even had children. You don't do this every week, but once in 2 months is fine. And it was much fun.
Also once you get older, you don't play games to win or tell your friends you finished a game faster than they did. Playing for play's sake.
And yes, I play my GameboyAdvance in the subway when I have nothing else to do. And I am rarely the only one doing that. It's nice to live in Japan :-)